Stylish, but seriously flawed...,

Rating: 2/10 (27 January 2007)

V for Vendetta is a silly story about a victim of medical experimentation taking on the role of Guy Fawkes to lead society to revolution against the fascist oppressors and, oh, by the way, exact personal revenge on his tormentors in the government. In order to enjoy the movie, the level of deliberate suspension of belief you must maintain is extraordinarily high.
V (named because he was in cell labeled with a Roman numeral V) is rounded up by a fascist UK government with a group of 48 others and subjected to medical experiments, which kill almost everyone except V. Somehow (never explained) there is fire and explosions that result in massive damage to the medical facility and V escapes. Ten years later, V who can only exist behind a mask because he is so violently disfigured to be almost unrecognizable as a human, has ensconced himself in a formidable fortress built out of the closed London Underground. He has also managed to fill it with priceless works of art while digging out and laying track beneath the English Parliament building.
He then decides to go on the attack, and using a variety of terrorist tactics, blows up the Old Bailey, takes over the government controlled network and makes a personal broadcast to the nation, and goes on an assassination spree. Somehow Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond gets sucked up in V's path and is spirited back to his redoubt where they have deep conversations over fried eggs in toast, archaic jukebox music and the movie The Count of Monte Cristo.
Evey gets talked into helping V kill one of his victims, but only goes along with it to try to warn the victim (a high ranking bishop of the Church of England who likes his girls young). When V makes his appearance and kills the bishop, Evey escapes and makes her way to her boss's flat. Her boss is a popular variety show host on TV and just happens to also harbor revolutionary sentiment, although he does not express it as strongly as V. However, he does tear up a government approved script on his TV show and replace it with one that makes fun of the government's attempt to find V. He discovers that he misjudged the government's reaction to his show when jack-booted thugs appear at his flat in the middle of the night, beat him up and haul him off. He later gets executed because the government found a copy of the Koran in his flat. He wasn't Muslim, he "just enjoyed the poetry." Evey gets caught in this fracas and wakes up in a prison cell, where she is tortured for information about V. When she is threatened with immediate execution and still does not give up any information about V, she is told she is finally free. She walks out of her cell past the fake guards and discovers that she has been held by V all along, oh my! But V let her live and lets her go after extracting a promise to see her before November 5th, which is when V plans to blow up Parliament. Oh, and as near as I can tell the only reason V took on the Guy Fawkes persona was that Fawkes originally planned to blow up the English Parliament several hundred years ago. That and maybe V's penchant for swords and explosives as weapons of choice over guns. But really, it's probably because a wooden Guy Fawkes mask looks "cool" on someone dressed all in black.
Meanwhile the police discover that the Conservative Party used the fear that America's War on Terror generated to take control. They then purposely staged three biological attacks around the UK that killed over 100,000 people to cement their power. Then they rounded up all the writers and artists and killed them. Oh yeah, since Conservatives just absolutely hate homosexuals, they rounded all of them up and killed them too. They also conducted medical experiments on some of the gay people they rounded up. No word on whether V is gay, Evey tried to kiss him, but how much can you get through to someone by kissing his wooden mask. Now for some reason the government hates America. This all just goes to show how evil the fascist government is and how much V's revolution needs to succeed.
I won't bore you with the ending, it's pretty obvious what it would be anyway. The movie is basically a prettily filmed load of tripe. Even the fighting sequences aren't what I would expect from the Wachowski's except the one at the end, which is admittedly pretty cool. Some of the settings are effective, and the visual impact of the film is impressive. But you just can't get past the fact that the plot just stinks.