Alan Moore was right to remove his name from this film.

Rating: 1/10 (18 April 2006)

When I first heard that Alan Moore's V FOR VENDETTA was being adapted for the screen, I enjoyed a brief frisson... but this quickly turned to a cynical wait-and-see attitude after I read that Moore himself was asking to have his name removed from the project. Alan Moore is known to be rather rigid in his scruples, but there are those who feel that his rigidity is overblown, and that the man is some kind of bitchy primadonna.
Count me in, Alan. This film is a piece of garbage.
Sure, it *looks* good. The cinematography, costuming, makeup, sets, and all around technical merit can't be faulted much, although the film does suffer slightly from touches of a misguided Matrix-like darkness. Many of the shots in the film are startlingly like panels from Moore's original graphic novel... but looks are not everything, and sometimes they're not anything at all. Moore's V FOR VENDETTA is a piece of work with a serious, vibrant, important, and challenging message, not a wretched excuse for the usual Hollywood explosion porn that one might find in any Bruce Willis action abortion. Director James McTeigue and screenplay writers Andy and Larry Wachowski should be ashamed of the gutting they've given Moore's work. They have hijacked a truly inspiring piece of truly subversive art and cranked out a hollow, incoherent, castrated, de-fanged and de-clawed mockery of it. Their adaptation is a dark triumph of idiot form over intellectual substance, an arrogant slap in the face laden with product placement to add insult to the injury. This is carefully preripped punk rock fashion being sold in Macy's. It's Pat Boone singing a Little Richard song. This film is Velveeta being advertised as top-shelf Camembert.
I just don't know where to start digging into the fetid, cannibalistic co-opting that I see here. The only value this film has is as a touchstone for those of us who have read the graphic novel, and then only if we can overlook the utter debasement that has been perpetrated by McTeigue and the Wachowskis. Perhaps if we turned the sound off while watching.
Before seeing the film, I figured that no matter how badly they botched and bungled it, no matter how cynically they sold it out, it would still be a worthwhile thing if only V's televised speech was preserved intact. And of course, they gutted and polluted that too.
It could be argued that the politics of the film are nicely pointed, and pointed in the right direction: straight at the whorish corporate hearts of Bush's America and Tony Blair's England. The problem is that that point is (like the rest of the film's plot) muddied and blunted by an incoherence that makes one wonder how much of their zillion-dollar budget went up the noses of Mssrs. McTeigue and Wachowski in the form of entertaining white powdery substances. This is aside from the fact that Moore's V FOR VENDETTA was clearly, overtly, and unapologetically a manifesto of Anarchism as a polar opposite of Nationalism-cum-Fascism, while the McTeigue/Wachowski version is a thin, watered-down gruel that has rejected Anarchism as too radical, too controversial, and tossed it unceremoniously into the lime-pit in favor of an inchoate tissue of vague and fuzzy Democracy Lite... in fact, it turns our hero to the cause of exactly the sort of poorly defined emotional-response pseudo-Democracy that has been rammed down our throats by crypto-Nationalist neocon flag wavers like Bush and Blair for most of the last decade. The only relief here is that they didn't shove any pious Christian dialogue into V's mouth... I guess they felt vindicated in totally blowing off the original political message by keeping the story superficially hostile to the Christian Right (John Hurt as the leader of Britain's Fascist/Nationalist government is still clearly a jerk who doesn't believe in the separation of Church and State, the kind of pig who is busily ruining America by insisting on the legislation of Christian morality in all contradiction of the concepts of religious freedom and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness").
Vendetta against those who would co-opt our nobler impulses and our rebellion in the name of corporate profits! And while we're at it, all hail Alan Moore... not so much for creating V FOR VENDETTA in the first place, but more for refusing to allow his ideals to be compromised by mere money, and for having the stones to disassociate himself utterly with this bowdlerized, bastardized, perverted, and ultimately worthless adaptation instead of taking the money and spreading his artistic legs like every whore in Hollywood who drops trou and bends over for big money business transactions. Woe unto those who actually paid to see it, and had no chance to make a similarly informed decision; for them (in an intellectual and political sense) this film is nothing more than a brutal symbolic gang-rape at the hands of counter-revolutionary corporate goons.
If you ever needed a justification for using BitTorrent to preview a film before coughing up your hard-earned money, this is it.