http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/v_for_vendetta/This is a pretty well written movie review from what rotten tomatoes brings up.
http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/vforvendetta.htmV FOR VENDETTA (2006)
***1/2 (out of four)
SUPPORT FILM FREAK CENTRAL:
starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt
screenplay by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
directed by James McTeigue
V for Vendetta
As documents for the opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest, angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them. It surmises a future where the government plants stories in centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion and brio--it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel, but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.
It gives hope that thoughtful, adult-themed, long-form comics ("graphic novels") can yet be translated to the screen as intelligent, topical, pulp-entertaining films (see also A History of Violence), with Alan Moore's The Watchmen awaiting adaptation and Neil Gaiman's near-canonized "The Sandman" in perpetual turnaround. V for Vendetta works--like the best literature, the best art--as a mirror to the audience, thus what some individuals might perceive as an attack on their value systems (ones based on mysticism, intolerance, and exclusion, granted) may have others basking in a self-righteousness that, better than George Clooney's aggressively dry but well-intentioned platforms, indicts an apparent attack on common decency. It's a polarizing film, and I confess that I'm too far to one side politically by now to see it in anything other than a ideologically gratifying light, but as a film it's also well-made: slick, exhilarating and outrageous. It reminds a lot more of Fight Club than of screenwriters the Wachowski Brothers' own The Matrix, and I do wonder if, like Fight Club, it won't lose esteem as it drifts away from that extreme topicality. Still, it's useful to remember that today, V for Vendetta feels like a slap in the face and a kick in the shorts; damnit if, when the Old Bailey loses its head, I didn't feel a little like whooping with that pleasure of destructive juvenile resistance. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
Already scourged in some corners as an apologia for terrorism, V for Vendetta is instead a cautionary tale about how monolithic governments create revolutionaries from ordinary people when they intimately violate them. The equation couldn't be simpler, nor could the affection V has for Rowland V. Lee's The Count of Monte Cristo be a clearer brand that our beloved anarchist is something of a vengeance-driven whack-job. ("I'm sad for Mercedes," says Evey, revealing in that moment to V that she might be the more suitable instrument of rapprochement in his grand schemes. "Dantes loves revenge more than he loves her.") The seeds of the formation of our own country can be traced to being mad as hell and not taking it anymore, our beloved USA transformed in the picture into a barely-glimpsed wasteland embroiled in a civil war after a badly-contained (self-inflicted?) plague decimates its population. The "Ulcerated Sphincter of Asserica" as foaming Rush Limbaugh-esque talking head Prothero (Roger Allam) calls it, receding in the background as the Wachowskis transform Moore's treatise on Thatcher's England into a still-scathing commentary on the toll of totalitarian thought on a public reared on democratic principles. Unlawful wire-tapping made lawful, secret prisons, all-pervasive media saturation, the avian flu, philosophy as science, legislating the bedroom, and the pushing of fear as at once the latest, greatest thrill-drug and the most effective opiate of the people... There is a focus on the suppression of art (and John Hurt as the film's arch villain reminds us that he was Evey prototype Winston Smith in Michael Radford's Nineteen Eighty-Four) as the first step towards the death of individual thought--there are, in fact, so many hot-button topics wired into the piece that it's something like a miracle it doesn't collapse in on its own outrage.
But what's wonderful about V for Vendetta is that it is, itself, artful. It plays Tchaikovsky next to Cat Power next to a wistful WWII croon while Portman provides her first truly great performance as an adult. Somehow, the British accent--a stumbling block for so many actors--has freed her to indulge in her waifishness, spiced with that hint of resolve that made her child-actor turn in Leon: The Professional ever so tantalizing a(n unfulfilled) promise. By never allowing its hero a face, and by further obscuring him behind a storm of gilded words, V becomes as slippery a signifier as Thomas Pynchon's Zelig-esque heroine of the same name, reminding of some combination of that literary gadfly and Britain's own King Arthur, thought to return whenever his country needs him most. In a period in our history when the cinema is caught emulating the golden endings of the fifties while constructing the tortured, misanthropic narratives of the seventies, V for Vendetta has the big brass ones to make its main characters arrested, criminal (what is Evey doing out after curfew?), and invested in the overthrow of the government for, of all things, personal reasons. It's an utterly humanist picture in that sense--and a hopeful one ground in the idea that not every epoch-shattering event growing from one person with one idea has to be the World Trade Center. Sometimes they can be Bastilles.-Walter Chaw
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