Amazingly Bad Social Commentary Flick

Rating: 2/10 (17 March 2006)

I went to see this movie this afternoon ... opening day here ... and was very, very disappointed.
So disappointed that I left the theatre after waiting for an hour for things to improve. I almost never walk out of a movie. But it was really that bad this time. And I wasn't alone. It was a late afternoon showing, and the rows I was sitting in ... up front (I always like sitting up front) included just 3 other folks. All seated separately. The other 3 had all walked out before I did.
There were two basic features of the movie that really moved it into the almost utterly awful category for me.
One was the figure of V himself. Hugo Weaving's vocalization of the character as far as I could tell was fine; but V and the script built around V were amazingly bad. V is sort of a Zorro with a soft, urbane English accent, and a Mask that seems incongruously similar to that used in the Halloween movie series, and a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. He's sort of a wimpy Bard spouting wisdom and culture and death and murder and revolution in such winning tones that we're apparently supposed to be as captivated as his audience by him. When he appears on TV, the movie shows several scenes of The Common Man, Woman, and Child, watching and listening with rapt mesmerized attention to a vividly unappealing super hero with soft, wimpy tones and patronizing metro-sexual language that I just can't imagine The Great British Nation ... or the Great Any Nation ... finding so deeply appealing. I found especially obnoxious the repeated scenes in an English pub, with several working class blokes staring mesmerized at this clown spouting faux Shakespeare. Instead of cracking jokes and mockery at such (to use a term often used in other connections) Bollux.
The other feature of the movie that rendered it extraordinarily unpleasant from my angle was its ham-fisted social commentary that boiled down to: Terrorism is just Another Name for Legitimate Resistance to Tyranny. In this day and age, that kind of moral equivalence is unusual mostly in its poor taste in this movie: to make the obvious even more obvious, there's a scene where the Natalie Portman character goes into a room full of the most amazing political kitsch and finds it Oh So Meaningful. So we see a portrait of a Union Jack titled "Coalition of the Willing" with a Nazi banner across it; and a picture of Margaret Thatcher (I think?) bowdlerized to evidently reflect some mockery that we're supposed to applaud. The Regime is composed of Bishops, Clergy, and other figures of Faith who are all Bad (one Bishop's fondness for under-aged females makes a particularly nasty scene) and other Evil People. I don't mind at all social commentary but when it's this ham-fisted and this silly it becomes to me just coarse and silly and stereotyped. It makes me feel like I'm watching an old propaganda film out of the old Nazi or Communist "Socialist Realism Theatre" days. Above all, though, the repeated vision of Terrorism as meaning Justice in Action is to me deeply offensive in these days after 9/11 and other such horrible tragedies. I think even Guy Fawkes ... the nasty real-life English terrorist on whom V is supposedly modeled ... must be rolling in his grave at such nonsense.
Acting was decent but unexceptional, cinematography competent but uninteresting ... there was one sort of interesting scene early on from a London rooftop. Other than that, though, the script was just so horribly dismal as to make this a truly and amazingly bad movie.