MikePadgett.com

V For Vendetta

— Reasonably average high-concept film on a nation laid low by extremism.”

• Director: James McTeigue
• US/UK, 2005
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By the third instalment, ordinary audiences had just about enough of The Matrix and its red pills, digital rain and ringing telephones. Certainly there were strong themes underpinning that trilogy, but old Neo did a bit too much dodging of slo-mo bullets and not enough exploring metaphors. However, in V For Vendetta, the Wachowski Brothers set aside the sullen monotone of Keanu Reeves – hardly a masterly mouthpiece – and put forth V, a literate, Fawkesian loner who propounds polemic while swishing shortswords.

Credit for the originality of the story goes to graphic novelists Alan Moore and David Lloyd. In a dystopian, near-future Britain, a fascistic government rules the nation by fear and surveillance. Sounds more than a little familiar, doesn’t it? The key to it all is a young woman called Evey Hammond. Natalie Portman infuses her protagonist with humanity but little sympathy. Indeed, whilst she portrays the agony of Evey’s imprisonment and interrogation with extraordinary directness, many of the scenes she shares with the enigmatic V are rather flat. It’s a curiously uneven performance. The Stephens Fry and Rea do good turns in supporting roles and Sinead Cusack manages to turn a few lines of script into a exercise in dignity and understatement. As the eponymous antihero, Hugo Weaving has a tough brief, delivering a range of emotions from behind a mask.

High-concept movies can be a hard sell and this stops well short of Orwell (even when John Hurt reprises his 1984 Big Brother role), lacking the tension and claustrophobia of the graphic novel. Like so many of these “comicbook movies”, the filmmakers were looking for a broad audience instead of the truth. It’s a shame that V For Vendetta is about the extent of Hollywood’s bravery.