V for Vexing

V For Vendetta

Directed by James McTeigue

If the big-budget sci-fi fable V for Vendetta had come out two years ago, it could be called subversive, but now it just seems another barometer of its time, making radical political cliches harmless by envisioning them in terms of comic book derring-do.

That's ironic considering that it made its first appearance in a 1981, anti-Margaret Thatcher cult comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The series ran 26 issues before the publisher folded, leaving fans hanging. In 1989, Moore and Lloyd finished the story and released the entire thing as a graphic novel. The story, set in a scary, quasi-Orwellian England, was a commentary on its own time (1998 being the near-future for them).

Not being clairvoyant, Moore and Lloyd could not have known that it would later resonate with American filmmakers looking to critique the War on Terror, the use of the flag as a bludgeoning device and the erosion of civil liberties. But that's how screenwriters/producers the Wachowski brothers treat the premise. It's just weird and impassioned enough that it keeps you engaged all the way to the end, when you realize that the movie's vision of revolution is a hash, and that it would just replace one faceless, scary horde of true believers with another.

Directed by novice feature filmmaker James McTeigue, a veteran assistant director making his debut in the big chair, it's an ambitious and promising film about a fascist dictatorship opposed by a lone hero. This anonymous knife-throwing, bomb-detonating revolutionary wears a Guy Fawkes mask and promises to topple the modern totalitarian government of England. This fellow, who leaves his mark on society in the form of a gigantic, graffiti-looking red "V" and resists giving away his true identity, is a comic book hero through and through and is given to monologues so lengthy and purple that even Morpheus from The Matrix might find them excessive. (Embracing alliteration at every turn, he's especially fond of words that start with the letter "V," like "vindicate," "vicious" and "virtuous.")

Natalie Portman stars as a working-class secretary named Evey, the daughter of slain political revolutionaries. She's this movie's version of Neo, an audience surrogate, warrior acolyte and revolutionary accomplice who at first resists the hero's entreaties, then embraces her inner guerilla for the good of humankind. V is fond of hyper-dramatic entrances and exits, which, in this video-surveillance-crazed world, creates more than a few plausibility problems, but even the uncharitable won't linger on those problems for long. The Wachowskis and their designated visionary make no pretense of presenting anything other than an English-accented political fable-one that does not try too hard to disguise the fact that it's actually a hyped-up, anti-Bush cautionary tale.

In this grim future, Her Majesty's government has been taken over by a cruel self-appointed "chancellor" (John Hurt-a wry bit of casting, considering his indelible performance as broken victim Winston Smith in Michael Radford's version of 1984). This world's police state is as omnipresent and terrifying as the one that ruled Terry Gilliam's Brazil. The dominant culture espouses casual hatred of anyone who's nonwhite or non-Christian (the state symbol is a blood-red crucifix with dual crossbars), and the chancellor seems to exercise absolute control over the media, who uncritically repeat whatever anti-V propaganda he feeds them.

That's awfully simplistic and heavy-handed, but luckily McTeigue has a surprisingly light touch and a clever design sense. The screen is abuzz with motifs that actually work. For instance, the color red gets a Kieslowski-meets-Action Comics workout. V often makes his pirate TV addresses backed by a red curtain; his romantic purity is signified by red roses and, as the story unfolds, these indicators connect with the velvety jets of blood that gush from the throats of jackbooted enemies and the red dominoes he uses to spell out his name in a collapsing pattern.

But there's a serious problem here, one that prevents the movie from tapping into the revolutionary ecstasy it clearly wishes to summon: No matter how much spectacular mayhem occurs onscreen, the movie remains flat, schematic and, well, comic-bookish.

You can't respond to the characters as people because they're not people, they're devices. Except for V, who's surprisingly expressive despite being hidden behind a mustachioed mask, they rarely transcend their emblematic function.

The decision to make Evey a by-stander in what should have been her own story chokes the movie's spirit even more. It's not Portman's fault. The role is a cipher, but she acts the hell out of it, taking you inside Evey's romantic apprentice mentality (their love is platonic but true, like the love between Beauty and the Beast in the old CBS series) and emphasizing her fear and fragility during an extended, often harrowing imprisonment-and-torture sequence.

The problem is that she's essentially a witness, an exposition-receiving device. She doesn't flower and take control of her own life until very late in the movie, and by then you're just not interested anymore. More damagingly, there's something pre-feminist and moldy in the sight of such a capable, intelligent young woman paralyzed by admiration for an abstraction.

It's like the relationship between Dagny Taggart and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, another populist fable (albeit libertarian rather than leftist-anarchist) in which a beautiful young woman humbled herself before a heroic abstraction. If Ayn Rand had lived long enough to write graphic novels, they would have played just like this.