Despicable -- And Yet Amazingly Boring

Rating: 1/10 (19 March 2006)

If Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot up Columbine High, were still alive, "V for Vendetta" would be their favorite movie. Never has a mainstream film so romanticized the grandiosity, the narcissism, the petulant grudge holding, the anal sadism, and the infantile paranoia that make up the terrorist personality.
"V for Vendetta" *is* marketing despicable ideas, but it's doing so in a flatfooted fashion. Director James McTeigue and the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the script, are not Leni Riefenstahl; unlike that Nazi master, they don't know how to make their evil ideas cunningly attractive or interesting.
The plot: authority figures like medical doctors, TV newsmen, politicians, and cops, are all really, really bad. Now there's a plot device that every immature seventeen year old who is convinced that his parents and teachers are out to get him will applaud.
There's only one really good hero out there, and he's showing how good he is by blowing things up, and, along the way, torturing a beautiful young woman. Wow! That immature seventeen year old is going to love that plot device. His urges to destroy, and hurt pretty girls, are actually virtuous? Wow. Let's give this movie a ten.
For much of "V for Vendetta," you are watching other people watch TV. When the filmmakers want to tell you that there is a scary government-manufactured virus on the loose, they don't actually dramatize that; rather, they show a man looking up old newspaper articles about a scary government-manufactured virus. This is such inept, and such incredibly boring, film-making that the mind reels, and the eyes look at the watch.
"V for Vendetta" tries to stage awesome images of fascists on the march, but there was only enough cash in the kitty to cast and costume about twenty or so fascists, which is less awesome than pathetic. "V for Vendetta"'s big, scary special FX is mostly poor John Hurt's very bad teeth magnified to six feet high. "V for Vendetta"'s fomenting of hatred against persons with bad dental work is shameful.
Even the action scenes are boring to the point of being inadvertently funny. V rescues a woman from evil police officers. And then he just stands there stiffly, spouting a boring soliloquy in which every other word starts with the letter V. I could hear people walking out at that point.
Ed Norton did much better work as the masked leper, Baldwin, in "Kingdom of Heaven." Norton must have studied how to make tiny body movements convey expression, even though his face was covered by a mask. Hugo Weaving offers no such acting talent. When you are looking at him, you are looking at a piece of immobile plastic. If nothing else, the cinematographer could have lit the mask in an interesting way. But that would have taken talent, and when you can blow things up, who needs talent?
Comic book movies are supposed to be unbelievable, but this one sets a new low. In an oppressive fascist state, a costumed crusader is able to walk unimpeded into government offices and the private homes of top leaders. Come on. These filmmakers aren't George Orwell. Their dystopia is about as scary as a hangnail.
Let's run through the movie's main ideas, either stated or suggested: 1.) AIDs is a government-manufactured virus. 2.) The US is the world's greatest threat to peace. 3.) Terrorism is the only way to make a contribution to society, because the people in charge are so evil and corrupt that there is no other way to contribute anything positive. So, oh, say, teaching children to read or working at a hospice or being an investigative reporter who gets to the bottom of corruption, or doing anything that requires patience or training or self discipline - that's just so uncool. 4.) Christians are really, really, really bad people. The Nazi swastika was not a pagan symbol; it was really just a Christian cross. Christian leaders have sex with child prostitutes. 5.) Islam is really friendly to homosexuals, and homosexuals run to Islam as a refuge from evil, oppressive Christians. 6.) Film footage we have seen of hostages taken by Islamic terrorists is really just dramatizations invented by our government in order to get us to hate Islam, so that we don't hate whom we really should be hating - Christians. 7.) 9-11 was really orchestrated by the American government. 8.) Terrorists are incredibly sweet and sensitive guys who rescue damsels in distress, recite Shakespeare, and have a connoisseur's appreciation of films from the Hollywood Golden Age. 9.) Terrorist acts are not so bad because no people die in them, they create beautiful fireworks, and they are a good excuse to listen to Tchaikovsky.
You get the idea. No, the movie doesn't say many of the above things directly, but it implies them. There is a government invented virus, there are government invented hostage tapes, there are homosexuals who are oppressed by Christians and turn to Islam, etc.
It's exhausting trying to catalogue the ironies that abound in this film. Here's just one: the film claims that it is all about protesting fascism, but the film's climax involves a celebration of individuals surrendering their individuality and acting as a faceless, violent mob. Folks, that's what fascism is. You could look it up.
Another irony: George Bush and his mistakes do need to be interrogated. But criticisms like this, which childishly and hysterically equate Bush with Hitler, give real criticism a bad name.