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V FOR VENDETTA Totalitarianism, “Vendetta” style Popcorn Reel.com Film Review: "V for Vendetta" By Omar P.L. Moore/March 27, 2006
James McTeigue’s film trumpets the tagline “people shouldn’t be afraid of their governments…governments should be afraid of their people,” but perhaps his movie is afraid of its audience becoming comatose, because while it pulsates with a visceral energy at moments, it falls asleep most of the time.
“V for Vendetta” is set a few decades into the future, in what has become fascist, totalitarian Britain. Central London, like the rest of England, has been under the auspices of an extremist Parliament which is run solely by one person. In a little satirical twist, there is an omnipresent megalomaniacal TV talk show host whose hatred of all things not English, male or white is legendary. The host gets into a twisted frenzy while declaring the need to maintain England’s supremacy in the world.
Against this backdrop, a masked man named V (Hugo Weaving) randomly detonates London landmarks in the corporate area, and commandeers a television station, where he becomes a one-man wrecking crew before taking the air waves by force. V makes sure that the revolution will be televised. Along the way he encounters Evey (Natalie Portman), whom he has already saved once before from an almost certain rape during Evey’s breaking of the regime-imposed curfew. This time, V saves her again, and compels her to live with him for a year until the plan for complete revolution is hatched, on the next November Fifth, an anniversary commemoration of Guy Fawkes, who attempted to explode the British Parliament some 400 years ago.
From here, the film unfortunately goes downhill as Evey spends a good amount of screen time trying to understand what makes V make his revolutionary stand. The film has great potential and appears to provide great promise, but ultimately falls by the wayside. At times however, there are provocative, fiery and incendiary ideas cinematized in bold ways, but much of the film, which is 20 minutes too long, centers on Portman's relationship with, and journey into understanding the masked marauder to totalitarian England. The journey isn't the problem, but the pacing and overly sentimental process is. Whether by design or otherwise, the V/Evey relationship in “V For Vendetta” reminds one of the "father-daughter" relationship Portman had with the anti-hero of another film in recent memory, “The Professional”. There also is not enough of a backstory on Evey that makes us sufficiently care about her plight.
And as if to legitimize its attempt to be a film to be taken seriously, the end credits features a soundtrack of Malcolm X speaking about revolution and the “ballot or the bullet”.
There have been better films which have wasted the talents of Hugo Weaving (who spends the entire time wearing a mask that looks like it was left in the prop room for “Eyes Wide Shut”), Stephen Rea and Natalie Portman, but this one is not one of them.
Copyright 2006. Popcornreel.com. All Rights Reserved.
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