The first half-hour is great but then it drops you like a stone...

Rating: 2/10 (26 March 2006)

For the first half-hour the movie establishes a precedent to which it never lives up. By the time the movie is over you feel like either you were just manipulated into sitting through some political propaganda film based on the current social woes of our modern society or that you were ripped off by paying for a movie with a bad story. The acting is not bad but it would have been better served with a concise and more direct approach to an ending that means to say that the only way our present society will survive in the future is through tolerance and understanding of those people who are gay and non-Christian. The whole movie is set with antagonists who represent a totalitarian evil government that use and corrupt "faith" as a means for justifying their intolerant and corrupt gestapo-like forms of rule and order, much the same way that Stalin, Lenin, and, of course, Hitler, used their corrupt beliefs to establish a perverted form of government. In the first third of the movie this premise works well and makes the movie seem believable and directed with a sense of justifiable political acumen intertwined with an entertaining action-packed and emotion-evoking storyline. Soon, however, Natalie Portman is put through a forceful and deliberate change in her perspective which enables her character to understand and believe in the anarchistic development that the titular character, "V", is advocating to promote HIS form of tolerance and understanding. It's my opinion that the plot is all quite convoluted and often plain stupid after these scenes--very overly dramatic and laughable. Check it out if you want a window of understanding for those people who feel oppressed and are tired of whining and so they must create anarchy. You'll get some good laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. The demographic profiles for this movie will tell you that the only reason this movie received a high rating is because the majority of the voters are young adults, who have impressionable minds and are anti-establishment wherever they go.