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V for Vendetta review
2006.04.18 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole
This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you.... [official site] |
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! That sounded better when Karl Marx said it. Most of V for Vendetta did too. Same with George Orwell. And John Wilkes Booth. And Sergio Leone. And Zorro. This stylish/foppish political stage play takes a mix of cultural touchstones from literature and the latest headlines and makes a mish-mash, sometimes successful, sometimes bizarre.
Visually, V for Vendetta is a mix, too, but largely all wrong. It is at times stunning; at times claustrophobic. The fight scenes are shot so tightly I was afraid the camera operator was going to take a punch. Director James McTeigue learned his craft in television and honed it as an assistant director, and it shows. He shoots his actors as if they are scale miniatures.
The film stars Natalie Portman as the girl who doesn't do much but does very little so very, very well that you'll forgive her. Her co-star is Hugo Weaving as V, a really marvelous performance, given that he is trapped behind an inert mask for the entire film. I kept racking my brains trying to remember who was playing the role and never once connected that deep, rich voice with Elrond or Agent Smith. They get support from Stephen Rhea, who is so good as the put-upon detective struggling with a case and influential government officials that it made me want to watch Citizen X again (consider it an effective alternative to V). And John Hurt and Stephen Fry help out in welcome roles.
I kept racking my brains trying to remember who was playing the role and never once connected that deep, rich voice with Elrond or Agent Smith. |
In fact the acting all around is quite good (when Portman's accent isn't distracting). But alas, the material lets them all down. V for Vendetta was a comic book before it was adapted for film by the Wachowski brothers, who also brought you The Matrix.
It's set in an alternate future Britain, where an epidemic killed a hundred thousand people before a fascist government took over to stop it. Now a terrorist is seeking to bring down that government... by pretending to be Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes is a strange sort of anti-hero to Britons, but V comes off as just a crackpot vigilante until his psychosis starts to show. Portman's character Evey seems to come close to recognizing how truly demented he really is at one point but then, inexplicably, forgives him.
It's hard to view V thru any other lens than the one we've fashioned to view Islamic terrorism. |
Since the mid-1980s, when V was written by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, the world has seen some pretty awful terrorism. It's hard to view V thru any other lens than the one we've fashioned to view Islamic terrorism. That's the one that says that trying to change people's minds by blowing things up and killing people in the streets is fundamentally immoral and ineffective.
But it works for V. British citizens under fascism are ripe for revolution, and that's just what he offers them... if they wait a year. This rather strange plot device doesn't make any more sense in context either.
The underlying dementia that breeds terrorism is all too evident and, ultimately, repulsive. |
It's too bad really. There are parts of V that work marvelously, making you want to march in the street against authoritarianism and oppression... but not blow up buildings. The underlying dementia that breeds terrorism is all too evident and, ultimately, repulsive. It makes one wonder what V's future Britain will be like when he and his angry mob are thru with it. Several times, homophobia is the focus of the government's religious fascism. But what are the chances that an angry mob is going to riot in the street, burn the government to the ground, and build a new government based on tolerance?
f e e d b a c k
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