V for Vendetta
Director: James McTeigue. Cast: Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt, Stephen Fry, Rupert Graves, Tim Pigott-Smith,
Natasha Wightman, Sinéad Cusack, Roger Allam, Ben Miles, Eddie Marsan, John Standing, Billie Cook. Screenplay: Larry and Andy
Wachowski (based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd).
"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments," blare the ads for V for Vendetta. Instead, "governments should be
afraid of their people." I find myself forced to ask, must anyone be afraid of anyone? Apparently the question has become
rhetorical for screenwriters Larry and Andy Wachowski, who have frittered all of the juicy irony and narrative instincts
that governed Bound, their debut feature as directors, and instead locked themselves
into a permanent embrace of the murderous paranoia and flat-footed abstractions of their misbegotten Matrix
but munificent trilogy.
True, the Wachowskis have not directed V for Vendetta. Nor has anyone else, though onscreen credit accrues to first-timer
James McTeigue. A figurehead leader if ever there was one, McTeigue seems to have been manacled from imposing any stamp, texture, or
order onto the film's scenes. Whether the Wachowskis consciously threw their weight around the project, or whether McTeigue has been seduced and colonized by
their aesthetic example, or whether all three men have pilfered every one of their visual and narrative trademarks from graphic novelist
Alan Moore, V for Vendetta is almost laughably profligate in recycling Matrix motifs. The totalitarian state of
the near future. A messianic underground of armed resistors, including a fine-boned woman and a masked man. (If anyone's face
is a mask, it's Keanu's.) A forced conversion of a new rebel-savior, whose enlightenment commences with the shaving of a head.
Reckonings in subway stations and marble-paneled office buildings. A late-breaking orgy of violence, where the laws of physics
are helpfully annotated; this time, instead of bullets that ripple the air, we have knives that trace their own trajectories.
Perhaps after allowing the Matrix sequels to depart so drastically from the first film's successful recipe, and watching
a globe of frothing converts reject the series as quickly as they first took it up, the Wachowskis are either too eager to
revert to familiar tropes and spectacles or too scared to try anything remotely new. Whatever the reason, V for Vendetta
plays like a fanboy's excursion into Matrix style, lacking the Wachowskis' gleaming finesse but aping their appetite
for nihilistic narrative. That V for Vendetta feels more ramshackle, more amateur, more transparent in its rabble-rousing
ambitions is certainly to the film's artistic discredit, though, mercifully, I expect that these very failings will curb the
movie's propagandistic appeal, making it less accomplished than The Matrix but, for that very reason, less dangerous
as a vehicle for the thinly tarted-up vigilantism underlying the whole project. A certain measure of credit is due to any
film that mounts a full-scale detonation of the (unpopulated) houses of Parliament and asks the audience not just to sympathize,
but to believe that our own discontent and disenfranchisement has been symbolically interpellated into the scene. The smoky
pandemonium after a bombing in a television studio is, at the level of editing and visual impact, an even more potent scene. Still, equal
discredit is due to any film that can't stage the surrounding context for this sequence with any life whatsoever, and to any
film where Natalie Portman probes sub-Amidala levels of catatonic non-charisma, and to any film with photography this stilted
and a story this discombobulated. The problem isn't that V for Vendetta is vacuous—one observes the film strenuously
attaching itself to contemporary political deadlocks and gathering global furies—but that it's helpless at shaping this
material in any but the most threadbare ways, give or take its plagiarisms of earlier films that at least had formal craftsmanship
on their side. C–
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