V for Vendetta: A Flawed But Interesting Collection of Ideas

At its worst, V for Vendetta plays like a PSA on why your parents should be voting for one guy and not the other, as an occasionally incendiary and sometimes vague thriller that has been used as a one-size-fits-all critique of every major public office candidate of the last twenty years. Still, this movie has its moments, and at its best, it possesses all the antics and showmanship of a theater kid, and if you've spent any time around theater kids, you'll know the cliches are both entirely justified and yet somehow completely unfair. In 1605, the Catholic Guy Fawkes was executed by hanging after he tried to kill the Protestant King James of England in a colossal failure of an assassination attempt that came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot. He died quickly, but the legacy of a man who was essentially a terrorist did anything but. Fawkes's mask is a timeless symbol of resistance, and we have his theatrics to blame for the notoriety, and the imperfect but intriguing V for Vendetta to thank for popularizing the symbolism.

It's an alternate 2020, and Great Britain has been taken over by Adam Sutler and his Norsefire Party, fascists who may or may not be more desperate control freaks than those in charge of the actual Britain in the actual 2020, depending on who you ask. Shallow political cheap shots aside, Evey Hammond is an employee at BTN, the state-run broadcasting network, and through a fortuitous series of events, she comes into contact with V, the infamous masked vigilante whose idea of introducing himself to a woman is blowing up a courthouse while both of them watch from the safety of a distant rooftop. Take notes, boys. This is a Wachowski sisters movie, and it shares much of the same dystopian atmosphere and many of the stylized visual tropes of The Matrix, though it's not nearly as thoughtful. Nevertheless, even if this movie doesn't always know how best to say what it's trying to say, it possesses the swashbuckling charisma of a confident man with ideas, and though ideas do not bleed, feel pain, or laugh like people can, they still matter.

V for Vendetta is an incredibly theme-heavy movie, and everywhere you turn here, you'll be confronted with a message of some sort. It is far from the most subtle movie ever created, but it does recognize the power of an idea and has the panache to mostly pull off its own. For better and for worse, this movie takes itself and its thematic theatricality very seriously, and while its artificiality can get grating and theatrical when combined with some pretentious dialogue, the masked figure at its core is a man that I can't help but feel drawn to - such is the power of a little bit of anarchy and a lot of showmanship. V is a wildly interesting character, a confident and enigmatic masked man who makes for a strong thematic core to the movie. His quiet, complicated, and endlessly dramatic demeanor is fun in the same way as a comic book, which is appropriate when considering the movie's graphic novel source material.

Nevertheless, even if V makes for an interesting character, everything about his movie comes back to its ideas, and one thing that doesn't work quite as well as its cast does is its hoped-for critiques and real-world allegories, which fall apart when thrown against the wall of one-dimensional and cartoonishly totalitarian villains. It would be difficult for anyone to draw intellectually honest real-world allegories between modern-day first-world politics and the Norsefire Party, though I've no doubt that some of my more politically desperate peers have tried. This movie's total lack of any redeeming qualities for its villains or their villainy neuter what could have easily been an even marginally more potent commentary, and though I understand that source material can tie the hands of those working on an adaptation, a little creative license isn't a bad thing, especially if you're turning talking points into people instead of the other way around.

This movie's habit of conflating stereotypes with commentary aside, there's still much to be found in V for Vendetta that's more than worthy of commendation. It possesses a keen attention to detail when it comes to the little things in its world, things such as Evey's remark to V after he cooks eggs for her about how she hasn't had real butter since she was a little girl, which one can only assume is due to the Norsefire Party's iron grip on items as normal to us as what you'd spread on your toast. It also has heart, and you'll find Evey to be a sympathetic character who endures unimaginable hardships that will reveal her humanity and make her very easy to root for. V for Vendetta snuck up on me with an unexpected empathy hiding under the guise of a relatively run-of-the-mill dystopian, and the latter half of this movie is unexpectedly strong, if not necessarily narratively surprising.

All things considered, this movie has issues expressing some of its headier ideas, but that doesn't stop it from trying with all its heart, and I have to give it props for that. And maybe I'm just uncultured, and the comic series is really as equally forceful. Either way, the movie does begin to gather a head of steam as it gets progressively longer, and it gets heavier with time, if not necessarily more measured. It's like listening to someone with a truly interesting life story and some misconceptions about how to publicly speak give a talk: the flaws in the way the message is delivered are obvious, but the passion remains undeniable. Maybe it's unfair of me to give a movie credit for nothing more than its larger goals, but in this case, I don't think so.

This is the classic case of an interesting movie with a lot of ambition and only some of the necessary skill to bring it to life. However, I'd be lying if I said it was a total loss. V for Vendetta contains an interesting cast of characters, a love for the little details of its world, and some genuine heart it's better at conveying than heady ideas that may have been better off in the hands of some other director. For what it's worth, there are plenty of good things to say about this movie, and it caught me in a good mood. Sometimes, liking things is simply more fun than not.

V for Vendetta - 6/10

Proverbs 22:16