Pulp Political Posturing, Just an Overgrown Comic Book

Rating: 4/10 (8 October 2010)

OK, with the budget, crew and actors, it was well made, no doubt top shelf UK production on a technical side. But as a political parable it just sucked. It mixed modern left leaning tropes about 9/11 Truther nonsense about the government staging false terrorist attacks to gain power with some straw man right wing Xtians as the all around bad guys. It had John Hurt as the erstwhile dictator, just like those other movies where he played some 30s style dictator or subject of one. I am no fan of the Xtain right here in the US, and while this film was made in the age of Bush, I also found the insinuation that those backwards moralizing phonies, fundamentalists & geeks are really blood thirsty tyrants to be too much of a stretch, considering NONE of those 30s style dictators were vary religious, with the exception of Franco, who was the least insidious of that crew.
Also, the typical one man army concept, our V, who can kick ass and slash 100s of armed opponents is so freaking stupid & stale, it deserves to be knocked flat on that count alone. He also seems to have unlimited resources, like the money and cut outs needed to mail 8 million Guy Fawkes masks to random people, and access to all sorts of explosives & public buildings etc. that any totalitarian police state worth its salt would detect in less than a month. There is no subtlety. A gay TV personality played by Stephen Fry, a friend of our put upon heroine, makes some lame TV satire of the terrorist and exalted leader. For this you'd expect him to be maybe fired and exiled unless he recants, but the evil leader has him killed in front of the cowering heroine, who was hiding in his house.
Finally, as proof of stupidity masking as the profound, Guy Fawkes, the 17th Century Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament with barrels of gunpowder, is the proto hero and the inspiration for our un-named V, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask throughout the movie as more than a disguise. To English people this is known as the Gunpowder Plot and its thwarting is celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day. Well, weren't the Catholics back then the religious zealots who were trying to get England back in the Roman Catholic Church fold? For a movie that pans Christian fascism and exalts freedom, it would be like having whores and strippers march for chastity. So much for comic book politics!