A tasty appetizer for a grand main course?

Rating: 8/10 (22 March 2006)

"V for Vendetta" is a sprawling urban fantasy that solidly entertains, despite puzzling the viewer in annoying ways that one can only hope will eventually prove to be strategic. A mega-budget adaptation, by the Wachowski brothers who gave us the "Matrix" franchise, of a series of graphic novels (which I've never read, I cheerfully admit to being a just-devirginized fan), it's more or less a hodgepodge of "1984" and any number of Euro-traditional super crook epics, from the early silent days, like "Fantomas", laid out in a cunningly abstruse manner. While it seems to be a self-contained narrative, chugging along in a haphazardly linear way to a grandly philosophical conclusion, any certainty that the story actually ends is undermined by lingering doubts over the reality of much of what's occurred. Nothing so hokey as "it was all a hallucination", but the viewer senses that maybe both his and the girl protagonist's perception of events has been toyed with, and there's plot elements all along the way to back this up. Couple these with the fates of several key characters, which we're only told about, and there's more than a whiff of a new franchise in the works especially if there's a big about-face over whom the real villain(s) of ongoing piece turns out to be.
Set in a totalitarian Britain of the not-too-distant future, the madly convoluted plot involves a quasi-heroic terrorist mastermind with super human fighting skills, bent on bringing down the oppressive police state. To this end V, the title avenger, serial murders various government bigwigs, hijacks the media to inspire civil disobedience, and demolishes grand old London landmarks. This penchant for historical vandalism, which he somehow justifies as nobly symbolic with oodles of strange rhetoric, is in tribute to his hero Guy Fawkes, the celebrated 17th century insurgent who tried to blow up the British parliament. V wears a plastic mask replica of Fawkes's face at all times, to cover up disfiguring burns he once suffered as a human guinea pig in government medical experiments, which put him on his path of vengeance. This, at least, is what he keeps telling Evie, the young working class heroine played by Natalie Portman, as an excuse to never unmask and, we're led to suspect, reveal his true identity. As she's recruited, kicking and screaming by increasingly diabolical methods, into V's deadly campaign of civil war mongering, neither she nor the viewer are ever quite sure why she's been chosen, even though flashbacks to her tragic childhood keep appearing in a somewhat explanatory fashion. As for the climactic suggestion of unrequited romantic love on V's part, a la "Phantom of the Opera", this has more the feel of a mere plot development than any corny attempt at tidying things up.
Still, assuming that this is indeed only the first chapter -- will number two be "W for Something Else", then so on with X and Y? -- it brilliantly camouflages the fact, by leaving the impression of being a thought-bombarding political allegory in the style of Truffaut's version of "Fahrenheit 451", way more concerned with the message it leaves behind than any big action pay-off, despite lots of good bloody fights along the way. Without giving away the aforementioned grand finale, there is so much speechifying that surrounds it, pertaining to the liberation and abiding strength of the human spirit, that one ponders how literally, rather than intellectually, the images on the screen are meant to be taken. I found myself thinking that what I was looking at was a bizarre and big scale rip-off of the 1985 depression era drama, "Places in the Heart" (of all things), with its tear-jerker church house ending that turns into a ghostly curtain call. Only later, when taking into account all those dangling plot threads, and just how morally questionable the ending actually is, did I say to myself, "Now just a damn minute, here!" Either I'd just watched something maddeningly vague and half-realized, or here was the groundwork for a true thinking person's super epic, which might combine the genres of science fiction action and political thriller in ways never seen before.
At any rate, "V for Vendetta" baffles and infuriates, but anything that can time release that much second guesswork, and demand to be quickly seen again just for what might've been overlooked, especially within that molasses-thick dialogue -- here's a film that's doing something right, in my books.