V of Vendetta

It's also for Valueless gibberish. Yet another graphic novel has been bulldozed on
to the screen, strutting its stuff for an assumed army of uncritical geeks - a fanbase
product from which the fanbase has been amputated. This film manages to be, at
all times, weird and bizarre and baffling, but in a completely boring way. Watching
it is like having the oxygen supply to your brain slowly starved over more than two
hours. The script is by the Wachowski brothers, based on the original comic-book
creation by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and James McTeigue directs - graduating
to his first feature after assisting on the Matrix sequels.

Imagine, if you will, the Britain of some 20 years hence as a kind of retro-futurist
Orwellian police state with tatty, Blitz-era posters with creepy state slogans on
decaying brick walls, but modern buildings like the Gherkin visible on the London
skyline, and in which there are portraits of John Hurt everywhere as a gauntly
bearded, Leninist Big Brother. You will have to imagine it pretty hard, because this
movie has not imagined it, at least in no more than in an 1980s pop video way. The
British people are living in a state of resentful oppression and dental disrepair: and
they are represented in various scenes by about a dozen or so Equity members,
quaintly shown at the pub or in their prole front rooms, glumly watching the state
television network on which propaganda is pumped out.

There is, it seems, a lone terrorist-cum-revolutionary opposed to all this: a Scarlet

Pimpernel figure whisking through the shadows, spouting rhetoric, and generally
causing mayhem. His name is simply V, a man with a vendetta against tyranny and
some personal grudges; he affects the cloak, hat and grinning mask of Guy
Fawkes, the most famous conspirator in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. The voice is by
Hugo Weaving. V has a friend, ally and, who knows, perhaps even a beauty-and-
the-beast-style love interest in a young woman called Evey - geddit? - a television
researcher played by the reliably terrible Natalie Portman.

V is a mystery; he begins the film by blowing up London's central criminal court, the
Old Bailey, with a firework display of explosives, accompanied by Tchaikovsky's
1812, which he has sneaked on to the police PA system - and he has more
inspiring and, apparently, victimless crime-spectaculars in mind. How exactly V has
managed to do this is a big mystery, the secret to which the film is uninterested in
revealing. Pettifogging real-world considerations wouldn't matter, or matter as
much, if the style and design were in any way witty or interesting. They sadly
aren't, and McTeigue believes that by repeatedly showing people with shadows
falling mysteriously across their faces he is reproducing the world of the comic
book. V's fight scenes, featuring much oblique slashing with highly polished blades,
are unexciting and unscary.

Portman for some reason has a thin, wittering South African accent as Evey, which
may have been superior to other thin, wittering accents she tried out in rehearsal.
There are a couple of London coppers played by Stephen Rea and Rupert Graves
and in the course of apprehending a suspect Graves actually uses the word
"chummy" - for which he deserved to have his collar felt by someone or other. John
Hurt plays the sinister Chancellor figure, seen addressing his creepy cabinet of
enforcers as a giant face on a screen, a hackneyed design tic that may be intended
to recall his performance as Winston Smith in the movie version of 1984. Roger
Allam plays a blustering, reactionary TV commentator who naturally turns out to be
a former black-uniformed agent of the state.

None of these characters is convincing on any level, but interestingly something

might have been made of the persona of Deitrich, the closet-gay TV host who
employs Evey. He is played by Stephen Fry with an energy that hints that with a
better written role, or really any sort of role at all, he could have raised this film's
game a notch or two.

V For Vendetta is such an odd mixture: partly naive post-punk posturing, betraying
the original's 1981 origins, and partly well-meant (but very American)
condescension towards London and Britain. Like tourists with a phrasebook, the
Wachowskis get people to say "bollocks" a fair bit, and there is a pastiche of The
Benny Hill Show. On the higher end of the cultural scale, V declaims Shakespeare,
and in honour of Guy Fawkes's subversion in the age of James I, reels off lots of
Macbeth. But he fails to quote the only appropriate lines: the ones about it being a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Since you’re here…

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading and supporting The
Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever before. And unlike
many new organisations, we have chosen an approach that allows us to keep our
journalism accessible to all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford.
But we need your ongoing support to keep working as we do.

The Guardian will engage with the most critical issues of our time – from the
escalating climate catastrophe to widespread inequality to the influence of big tech
on our lives. At a time when factual information is a necessity, we believe that each
of us, around the world, deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its
heart.

Our editorial independence means we set our own agenda and voice our own
opinions. Guardian journalism is free from commercial and political bias and not
influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This means we can give a voice
to those less heard, explore where others turn away, and rigorously challenge
those in power.

We need your support to keep delivering quality journalism, to maintain our

openness and to protect our precious independence. Every reader contribution, big
or small, is so valuable.