This can't be about George Bush, the dictator's way too articulate.....

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2006)

"V for Vendetta" begins promisingly in a London apartment about twenty years hence with Natalie Portman apparently getting ready for a date (even though it's almost eleven pm) and barely paying attention to a guy on TV holding forth about "the former United States" having been doomed by sin and corruption, unlike England which apparently has morphed into fascism under the aegis of religion and anti-terrorism. Natalie goes out hoping to beat the "yellow curfew" (how many of us have zoomed to catch a yellow light in traffic?) but runs afoul of three "finger men" who seize the opportunity for a "bit o' fun." Right on cue appears a black-clad masked rescuer who after dispatching the finger men subjects poor ol' Natalie to the longest, most opaque speech I've heard in a movie in years (or maybe ever). The puzzled look on her face probably mirrored mine. After the stranger has exhausted every V-word in the English language (except maybe "vampire" and "vivisection") he invites her along to a mysterious rooftop "concert." If you accept that she takes him up on it, you'll probably take the rest of the film in stride; if not, you probably won't.
There's something about "V" that just seems a little "off"; hard to put one's finger on it. It's not the liberal borrowing of elements from other movies, including the later scenes in "Pink Floyd The Wall" for the visual aura; it's not the forced marriage of humor and cruelty; it's not the gaps in plot and character; we overlook those all the time if what's on screen is working for us. I think the problem is what George Bush Sr. called "the vision thing." Depictions of the future, especially a tyrannical future or otherwise gone awry, need to appear to have sprung forth fully formed like Athena from the mind of Zeus. "THX 1138," "Death Race 2000," "Bladerunner," "Brazil," "Ultraviolet" all have this in common: everything in them contributes to the desired effect and/or message. "V," though, is all over the map. Natalie's boss at the former BBC (now the "BNT") turns out to be a closet dissident who has a whole secret section of his house devoted to contraband like a copy of the Koran, because he knows he'd be in deep doo-doo just for having it; yet he produces a TV sketch lampooning the dictator and seems stunned when the government goons kick down his door. Well, which is it: are people living in fear of this regime, or not? Also part of my problem with "V" is Ms. Portman herself; she's game enough and her accent is credible, but there's something lacking in terms of screen presence; she reminds me of Gertrude Stein's famous comment about Oakland, California: "There's no THERE there." Her "Evey" never really registers as a flesh-and-blood person; her personality and even intelligence level shift according to the needs of the plot. She even disappears for a while and once she's back, one wonders what she's been doing, but all we learn is that she went to a store and didn't get recognized by a former co-worker, presumably due to her shaved head; I'll admit she's the cutest bald chick since Persis Khambatta in "Star Trek The Motion Picture." But there is stuff to enjoy in "V," some droll lines (a TV type: "We don't fabricate the news, that's what the government does") and good performances, especially Steven Rea as a cop with a dollop of integrity left and John Hurt in his best role in years as the fire-breathing dictator who only talks to his subordinates on a huge screen while they sit in a dark room like game-show contestants; some striking imagery (a shot of emaciated corpses in a mass grave almost torques the whole thing into another milieu) and some timely caveats for Americans who seem to be letting 9-11-01 be used by political opportunists to disabuse them of those pesky civil rights. But here's my major quibble (and where the spoiler alert comes in): when it's revealed that the torture scenes (Natalie getting her head shaved, dunked in water, dumped on a barren cell floor) were all staged by the masked man himself as some kind of test for his putative protégé for whom he's supposedly developing all this affection, my suspension of disbelief sagged considerably. It was like the revelation in "The Village" that the "pioneers" were all modern people: "You bastards, you let a sick kid die at the outset and then you sent a blind girl stumbling through the woods where she might fall into a hole or get hit by a car once she reached the road? Rot in hell, or at least jail." Or in this case: "You bastard, how did you know she wouldn't drown or die in her cell or try to kill herself or be mentally scarred for life?" I mean even a fire-disfigured "monster" needs some consistency; the Phantom of the Opera didn't turn on Christine until she'd pulled his mask off ..
By the way, if Guy Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up the King and Parliament, probably that would've meant the end of England as an entity and then maybe no America, so maybe the Americans who've made this a box-office hit should do some pondering on the ramifications of violence. Did that trainload of fertilizer at the end remind anyone (other than myself) of the late unlamented Timothy McVeigh? If you want to "do something," go check out Michael Moore's website, for instance. Don't blow stuff (or people) up; ain't good karma, methinks....