Entertaining

Rating: Null/10 (27 March 2006)

This futuristic yarn about freedom fighters has something in common with Johnny Debb's dark story "From Hell" (2001) about Jack the Ripper - both are adapted from graphic novels by the same author, which may explain other similarities such as the fancy knife work.
Coming also from the Wachowski Brothers (written, but not directed this time), VfV however has the good sense of sparing the audience of the pseudo philosophising mumbo-jumbo that almost destroyed in the last two of the Matrix trilogy. Instead, it stays with the good old heroic formula of a tragic hero's quest for freedom of the people. Set in the year 2020, the time span of the movie is exactly one year, as the event unfolds from the mysterious V's (Hugo Weaver) blowing up Old Bailey to fulfilment of his promise/prediction a year later, mainly through the eyes of a young girl Evey (Natalie Portman) he rescues on the street from two secret police turned rapist.
Just about everyone who has seen VfV will associate the relationship between V and Evey to The Phantom of the Opera - mentor and protegee, older man and young girl. But one particular scene triggers another association in my mind - towards the end of the movie, as V saunters languidly into the room and find Evey at the jute box, coming back to him, the flavour of "Eliza, where the hell are my slippers" is just unmistakable.
It's just me, but I do feel a little bit cheated when the admission price I paid doesn't entitle me to have even a single glimpse of one of the leads. To rectify this, during most of V's dialogue, I closed my eyes and visualise Hugo Weaver's face behind the Guy Fawkes mask (which is really an illusion because that face, regardless of whoever plays is, would actually be a mutated face that may not even look human). With Weaver's distinctive voice and equally distinctive facial features, it works! As long as we are on faces, another star, John Hurt (playing dictator Adam Sutler), is just one  face that is, and can almost be mistaken as the twin brother of the Great Wizard of Oz. Still on faces, Portman's is, needless to say, a beautiful one. But it's her costumes here that are dazzling, which, most interestingly, are described by one female critic as "would make Amidala jealous" while by one male critic as "will have fetishists drooling". There you go.
But what about the movie itself? It has a bit of everything  spectacle, action, suspense, melodrama, heroism, conspiracy, political satire, science fiction, even a little chuckle here and there. Can't complain that it's not entertaining, but it doesn't rise above anything, from any angle. Frankly, I find the 8.1 (at the time of writing) average rating in IMDb quite puzzling.