'V' for wait for the DVD.

Rating: 3/10 (23 March 2006)

A comic-book-inspired muscle-bound burn victim dons a cape, a mask, and a big chip on his shoulder. He proceeds to kick the snot out of anyone who ticks him off.
No, it's not 'Spawn.'
John Hurt twerps his way through a dark, Orwellian fear-scape of goose-stepping fanatics and HUGE television sets.
Nope. Not '1984.'
Hugo Weaving stars in a climactic duel in which an invincible revolutionary annihilates faceless stormtroopers in a graceful, slow-motion kung-fu dance of bullet-time choreography.
'Matrix?' Guess again.
A comely young maiden develops feelings for a murderous Gothic fruitcake in a mask.
'Phantom of the Opera?' Nay!
A man is wronged horribly and sets out to even the score through extreme cleverness and cartoonish violence.
Batman? The Punisher? Spiderman? The Crow?
No, no, no and no.
You could say 'V for Vendetta,' the latest offering from the Wachowski boys is derivative. But that'd probably be an insult to derivation.
Okay, well, maybe it's got something insightful to say about politics. You hardly ever get that in the movies these days. I mean you've got to hand it to filmmakers with the nerve, in this day and age, to develop a sympathetic hero who espouses demolition as political commentary.
Set in a Great Britain of an indeterminate near future, the film poses a rather unlikely protagonist: 'V,' who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and never removes it -- even when he's making breakfast.
V's mad and we're never quite sure why. Granted, anyone would be homicidally angry if they had to live in a world in which the government uses the media to lie and distract us from real problems.
Okay, wait. Bad example.
What if the government was really, really bad. What if they sent people off to gulags for being gay, or reading the Koran, or satirizing the president? And what if no blog was powerful enough to stop it?
Yeah, okay, that'd blow. What's the plan, V? Encourage citizens to be politically active? To get up off their behinds and vote for a change? Turn the TV off and hand out fliers for an hour or two down at the train station?
V: "Well, no actually, I thought I'd dynamite a few baroque old buildings of immeasurable historical significance. Then maybe I'll stab some folks."
Hmm. Well, I suppose that's one way to go.
'V' stands less frequently in this film for 'vendetta' as it does for 'vascillation.' Is it a revenge plot with political undertones? Or is it a political plot with revenge undertones? Whatever seems to lend credence to any given scene, apparently.
As best as anyone might put together through the flashback scenes, V was some poor slob who got caught in the middle of some incestuous collusion between a pharmaceutical company and the government.
This I can buy. Hell, it's happened to my grandfather thanks to this idiotic Medicare drug plan.
Anyway, V got sick or something and was used as a human lab rat or maybe that was how he got sick and it's never quite clear how he came to find himself sick and imprisoned and ultimately, a burned-up mutant. Conveniently, nearly every person we meet who was involved in the trickery that made him a freak occupies a position of supreme power in a new British plutocracy: the president himself; the head of the church; and a popular Bill O'Reillyesque TV personality. Heck, two of these big-shots used to work at the very government installation where V became a burned-up mutant! So rubbing them out is not only good for Mr. V's personal sense of justice, but for the commonwealth as well.
Methinks not.
And as a measure of V's capacity to justify poisoning old ladies in their sleep, we meet Evey. V's unwitting and often unwilling partner in crime, Evey seems to exist so V's got someone to educate in the hard realities of politics, government, and hypocrisy. Not wholly sophomoric, these lessons include a short journey into the kind of hell millions must have suffered at the hands of the KGB and other totalitarian agencies -- a hell in which political prisoners are held interminably and pumped for information.
Good thing America doesn't do stuff like that.
Evey is played by Natalie Portman, still proving an acting career can be built on being extremely cute. She phones in yet another doe-eyed every-girl but manages almost to be interesting when she gets her head shaved.
In a laughably implausible conclusion, we are asked to believe that a British police detective, upon discovery of a plot to level Big Ben, would stand there and let some punk rock chick throw the switch on the advice of some bozo in a mask. No. Even, or perhaps especially if the detective had just uncovered a cabal of government and commercial collusion. Police detectives just don't do things like that. Ever.
And lastly, we are invited to believe that the populace of London could be won over to the side of a weirdo resembling a walking marionette. That they would do so after viewing a frightening political manifesto televised by said weirdo. And that they would express their allegiance to this weirdo by dressing up like him and marching downtown to watch one of their most beloved historical landmarks explode. If Timothy McVeigh had somehow convinced us all that the UN was going to take away our bibles, I still very much doubt we would have felt compelled to put on Timothy McVeigh masks, march down to D.C., and watch him tip over the Washington monument. Populaces just don't do things like that. Ever.
So what have you got. An often depressingly violent revenge picture mixed in with a lot of wrong-headed and sophomoric political wisdom all tossed into a shop-worn vigilante genre.
'V' is for wait for the DVD.