V FOR VENDETTA (2005)
Now kids, don't get your knickers in a twist.
Lots of people are eager to draw parallels between this "uncompromising vision of the future" and the present-day United States. While partly accidental (the graphic novel on which this is based is from the early 80's), I don't think it's coincidence that this movie was made now, instead of any other time in the last fifteen, twenty years. It's set in England, but there's an English Fox News, an English Bill O'Reilly (who says the US fell because of its "godlessness" - yikes, he's talking about a country that actually has Intelligent Design on the table!), an English Guantanamo Bay, and John Hurt as the tyrannical Chancellor...well, it's hard to see much of a parallel between him and Bush. Hurt's a very good speaker, and helpfully surrounds himself with heavy-handed reminders that he's evil.

Likewise, lots of other people are eager to paint the movie as sympathetic to terrorists, though of course one man's terrorist is usually another man's revolutionary (and the vice versa is always true), and that's a big part of the movie's point. The terrorist "hero" here does what is by far the most psychotic, sadistic thing we see anyone do in this movie, moreso than anything we see the government do - it's a scene that might not make you wonder if the dictatorship is so bad an alternative, but you probably will conclude "Wait a sec...this guy's fuckin' nuts!"

That's a little too much dust to kick up over what is essentially a pulp "stick it to the man" thriller, and though it's more literate than most it's hardly, like, subversive. The ads hype up the connection to the Matrix's Waschowski brothers, but don't let you scare that off - the bong-hit philosophizing of the Matrix movies is replaced here by something that's a little more tangible, maybe even useful, even if the ideas aren't exactly much of a stretch for anyone who can look at the government in this movie and agree that it's not the kind of government they want.

Set a couple of decades in the future, with almost no technology unlikely to exist now or in the next few weeks, V For Vendetta begins with complacent office flunky Evey (Natalie Portman) and swashbuckling, masked terrorist V (Hugo Weaving) both preparing in their separate dressing rooms for their nights out on the town. Evey stays out past curfew and gets harassed by the fuzz, until V saves her ass and has the most fun with a let-me-introduce-myself speech I've ever seen anyone have (does he use that on every hot chick he rescues?). This embroils her in V's struggle to bring down the government that makes detainee-raping levels of corruption in authority the norm, which eventually destroys the life she had. You may have heard, she has her head shaved.

I didn't catch just where V gets his money from (he must have carte blanche at FedEx), and yeah, his subterranean lair and not-quite-romantic relationship with Evey is a little too Phantom. But Weaving does a charismatic job of it considering that he never once comes out from behind that grinning mask (well, maybe once, but we still don't see his face and that's just as well since we've all seen Freddy Krueger). He delivers a televised speech to all of London (all of England? All the world?) where he accomplishes something I suspect is very hard to do - he convincingly reminds people that their plight is their fault, and he does it without delivering the news in a way that's snotty, patronizing, or bitter. We learn that the tyrannical government was put in place through overwhelming support by fanatically supportive citizens who were eager to trade their freedom for security, which either all joined the police or lost their enthusiasm, since the citizenry we see watches the English Fox News, doesn't seem to believe a word of it, and remains mostly inactive until the movie's English ID4 climax (which is given away in the ads).

Another climax in an abandoned subway station too-neatly wraps up a lot of things, V having convinced one of his most dire enemies to commit the most outrageous treason, that enemy seemingly unaware of the possibility that he's being manipulated. (this is also the only scene that much justifies the R rating, though it's nowhere near as obvious a placement as, say, one use of the word "cunt" in Inside Man, or that titty bar in Lost In Translation)

The dictatorship is a scarily unpleasant way to run a country, and it's shown with enough glitz that it's at least titillating fun to watch people be so mean to each other, even if certain important aspects of it get glossed over quickly (the religious element seems indispensable - has to be, considering how homosexuals get such brutal treatment - but is scarcely touched on). I don't know how much I believe that an England or an America is in any real danger of ending up like this within a generation, but what we see is awful enough that I'm sure even the death-to-liberals types would have fun watching a masked swashbuckler try to tear it down.

Graphic novel writer Alan Moore disowned it - third in a row, that's like some sort of credit-denying hattrick. However much or little it resembles its source material, V For Vendetta relentlessly tugged a smile out of me, and is awfully fresh and fun for a big-budget thriller released in March (delayed from November, reportedly due to the London subway bombings). Sure to be a staple of down-with-authority college dorms for ages to come.

(c) Brian J. Wright 2006

BACK TO THE V's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE