Total and utter dross

Rating: 1/10 (31 October 2006)

What annoys me most about this empty, vacuous film is that it started so well, and seemed like it was going to be an intelligent comment on the war on liberty that the British government is currently engaged in. The main character is a caricature, sure, and the dystopian state an exaggeration, but there is sufficient reference to the political smoke and mirrors of today ("rendition", "terrorism" and so on) to make it clear that the directors clearly think they have something worthwhile to say on the current situation. God knows, someone needs to start saying it.
Yet the ultimate message of the film is that violence is acceptable provided you think you're right. The hero, V, foments an anarchist revolution as vengeance for having been used in a secret biological weapons programme - he says that "I am what they made me" - and the opening sequence, where he takes control of a TV station and urges clichéd, typecast, idiotic proles to take the power back, certainly flatters to deceive.
Yet the film fails to notice that the gestures of V are as stylish, empty, and utterly image-dominated as the government that he is supposedly against. It's no use railing on, as the hero does, about how "ideas are bullet-proof" - this is exactly what totalitarian states rely on, the idea that their ideas are common-sense and utterly beyond debate or disagreement. What are V's ideas? It's never really clear, beyond the (again) clichéd trope that revolutionaries have the best style, the best clothes, the best pads and the best lines.
If the Wachowski brothers really want to rouse us from our slumbering disregard for the extent to which our lives are controlled by power, which seems to be the message of this film and the Matrix (remember the closing credits of the first Matrix film, with 'Wake Up' by Rage Against the Machine blaring forth), then what do they offer besides some vague idea that you can overthrow the powers that be using nothing more than some stylishly choreographed fight scenes and explosions, a dashing cloak, flaccid literary quotes and monstrously cool set design? That's all this film has, and while it's entertaining and fun, at its heart is not steely resolve but a pathetic emptiness, as deep as that it claims to oppose.
Complete crap.