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This is a very over-the-top kind of film that I enjoyed at the time, but I can clearly see, in retrospect, that it is rather flawed. The acting is actually pretty good--imagine overly-dramatic lines being delivered very well, and you'll have the sense of it-- but the story is a little wierd.
I guess the most obvious wierdness is the heavy Anglophobia--those dreaded Anglo-Saxons and their dread fascist leaders, oh my!--I mean, there's this really concerted effort in the film to transfer Nazi symbolism to the fictional English fascists, and, since, in the real world, the English played a key role, along with many other peoples, in defeating Hitler, playing this British=Nazi game is, well, at the very best, very childish, juvenile, and wierd. Also, there's the fact that the movie is very conspiracy-theory-happy--they put fascism in the drinking water!--and that the whole reason, basically, that the fascists have to be so ruthlessly evil is so that the anarchistic "freedom fighters" can be virtuous little dolls in comparison. It's basically the old moronic one-dimensional black-and-white good-versus-evil propaganda story, from a leftist angle. "V" is supposed to be the "hero" that the audience is clearly meant to cheer on, and he's given plenty of opportunity to air his particular brand of bombastic self-righteous I'm-addicted-to-the-sound-of-my-own-voice voice, and so his criminality is carefully covered over. At his heart, he's little more than a would-be tyrant, the sort of person who wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice people's lives for the sake of his ideas--but I suppose there's really little difference between a "revolutionary"--hurrah! hurrah!--and, basically, an intellectual killer--allow me to rationalize cutting your veins open by quoting from Shakespeare, my, aren't I something, eh?
Of course, there are other characters aside from V, such as Evey and Inspector Finch, but it's really a movie about politics, not characters and interpersonal relations, so of course, it's really all about V and his Idea, and the plot is really just the course by which V and his Idea take over everyone and everything else, even people who initially offered resistence to it--i.e., by questioning it's "justice". But, since V is, perforce, the all-conquering hero, omnipotent and more than a bit, well, un-human, "beyond" human (and, if you think about it, the presence of such an "over-man" in a movie paranoid to death about fascism is more than a little ironic), everyone and everything duly falls into line, as though according to a script. But, one-dimensional plot, aside, I suppose you have to give them credit for the good acting and all the rest of it, that it made it--how else to say it....'look neat', I guess.
There is another thing, though. I mean, I know how little people care about history, but considering how much V seemed to, well--get off on--reciting the old rhyme about the Gunpowder Plot, you'd think he might have some idea what he was talking about. It was not, alas, a failed anarchist revolution. It was actually an attempt to murder the legitimate government of England (although I suppose V doesn't consider there to be any such thing, even if the actual population, those silly non-intellectual, non-freedom-fighter sorts, do) in order to bring the country back into line with Catholic orthodoxy--in other words, to alter the religious, and political, constitution of the country by force, quite against the natural sympathies of the people living there. And, as much as V seems to idealize changing the established order by force, under the leadership of a self-appointed revolutionary, I for one simply cannot see what V's brand of sci-fi-action-anarchism has to do with a fortunately-unsuccessful plot to instigate religious persecution.
But of course, I am here opening myself to the criticism of taking a futuristic movie which is, at one level, just about Hugo Weaving beating the crap out of people, way too seriously. And yes, Weaving did make his dramatic character sound very dramatic and impressive indeed. And, yes, Natalie Portman's performance was very good, regardless of what one thinks of the ethics of her fictional mentor. And, yes, there were some good lines, "God is in the rain" being one of those rare ones which isn't a lot of over-dramatic chest-thumping. (It's delivered by Portman's character, Evey.)
So, I have it give it some credit for having a great cast, full of people who put in a good performance, but the fact that those characters were little more than props in the Grand Plan definitely stopped it from being a good movie.
(6/10)
