{"id":104,"date":"2006-03-24T13:41:21","date_gmt":"2006-03-24T17:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/?p=104"},"modified":"2009-09-10T22:20:52","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T02:20:52","slug":"v-for-vendetta-2006-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"V for Vendetta (2006) – Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hugo

Hugo Weaving is Snidely Whiplash on a mission in "'V' for Vendetta"<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

V for Vapid<\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n

[xrr rating=2\/5]<\/p>\n

V for Vendetta<\/em>. Starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, and John Hurt. Screenplay by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Directed by James McTeigue. Warner Bros., 2005, Color, 132 min. MPAA Rating: R.<\/strong><\/p>\n

V for Vendetta<\/em>, the latest installment of the Wachowski brothers\u2019s downward slide into formulaic banality.<\/em>\u00a0Directed by James McTeigue, the veteran first assistant director of such fare as\u00a0Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Matrix\u00a0<\/em>trilogy,\u00a0V<\/em>\u00a0is his first directing effort in which nobody but himself can be blamed for monumental ineptness.<\/p>\n

Upon its release,\u00a0V for Vendetta\u00a0<\/em>sparked a lot of debate among libertarians for its anarchistic and nihilistic themes, and from that vantage point I was prepared to write this review. Easier said than done. After viewing nearly all four hours of this CGI special effects extravaganza (during which, inexplicably, the hands on my watch moved only two hours and twelve minutes), I scarcely found any dialogue coherent enough to\u00a0be<\/em>\u00a0debated.<\/p>\n

Set in the England of the future,\u00a0V for Vendetta<\/em>\u00a0centers around its \u201chero,\u201d V, played by Hugo Weaving. V is a refined man of culture (after all, who\u00a0doesn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0enjoy hearing Julie London sing \u201cCry Me a River\u201d?), who surrounds himself with now-banned books. For you see, the great Fortress has been taken over by \u201cNorsefire,\u201d a fascist theocracy. Its leader, Chancellor Adam Sutler, is a neo-conservative turned Big Brother, played by John Hurt. Just so the subtle novelty of a fuming and spitting despot who governs by Jumbotron isn\u2019t lost on the viewer, the makeup people made certain to give Hurt a shortish-cropped mustache and a slicked-back shock of hair reminiscent of a certain Austrian corporal we all know and love.<\/p>\n

Against this repressive backdrop, V nurses a four-hundred-year-old chip on his shoulder about the hanging of Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 tried to blow up the British Parliament. V also has a laundry list of personal grudges: he survived a secret government biological warfare experiment gone awry, as well as burns over one hundred percent of his body.<\/p>\n

All of this is meant to guarantee the viewer\u2019s sympathy for V\u2019s sociopathic killing spree as a knife-wielding assassin and mad bomber. After curfew, he prowls London\u2019s streets, avenging Norsefire\u2019s innocent victims. He hides behind a plaster Guy Fawkes mask, which appears rather stiff, though not as stiff as Weaving\u2019s acting.<\/p>\n

V happens upon our damsel-in-distress, Evey Hammond, played by the waifish Natalie Portman, whom he rescues from a back-alley rape at the hands of the curfew police, in a deftly-choreographed, computer-generated bloodletting by stainless-steel daggers that produce the requisite \u201cswoosh\u201d and \u201cchunk\u201d sound effects. V sure moves pretty fast and furious for someone who\u2019s suffered one-hundred-percent body burns. According to the actuarial tables, he shouldn\u2019t be moving at all; but that\u2019s a moot point.<\/p>\n

After dispensing with the goon squad, V introduces himself to Evey by way of an alliterative soliloquy containing forty-seven words beginning with the letter \u201cV.\u201d It\u2019s meant to be charming and chivalrous, but comes off more like Snidely Whiplash doing a Jesse Jackson impression. V then asks Evey to accompany him for a night on the town, whereupon he blows up that citadel of British jurisprudence, the Old Bailey. Talk about fireworks on a first date!<\/p>\n

The next day, the government takes credit for his dynamiting job, claiming that Old Bailey was condemned as unsafe. Unfortunately, another side effect that V suffered in prison was an abiding and strident narcissism; so he takes over television broadcast studios to inform Londoners that\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0blew up Old Bailey, and that in one year\u2014on the day Guy Fawkes burns in effigy\u2014he will level Parliament. Through another subtle plot twist\u2014Evey just happens to work as a gofer at the TV studio (surprise!)\u2014V manages to sweep her up as his innocent accomplice. This sets up the tedium that follows, right up to the anticipated anticlimactic climax.<\/p>\n

V for Vendetta<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t just rip off George Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984<\/em>; that would imply some sort of thematic unity. Rather, this schizophrenic action pic is a pastiche of at least a dozen works far greater than itself. When not squiring Evey about his secret lair a l\u00e1The Phantom of the Opera<\/em>, V hunts down the bastards responsible for his fate in pale homage to\u00a0The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em>, while inciting the people to take back their country in a side plot embarrassingly reminiscent of that other \u201cV\u201d\u2014the 1983 TV mini-series about invading aliens from outer space. The film snitches from cinematic styles and genres, too. There\u2019s even a flashback that seamlessly melds the innocence of awakening lesbian passion with lush Merchant-Ivory “Room With a View” cinematography.<\/p>\n

Amidst all the slow-mo slicing and dicing, V is fond of chiding his deserving prey that \u201cideas\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0matter.\u201d In his televised appeal to the people, he lays the blame for their loss of liberty where it properly belongs, at their own feet. The film\u2019s tagline\u2014\u201cPeople should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people\u201d\u2014is a rather Jeffersonian conception that rings with the spirit of limited government.<\/p>\n

Yet for all its nods to individual liberty,\u00a0V for Vendetta<\/em>\u00a0fetishizes freedom through its direct advocacy of anarchy. Justifying his annihilation of Parliament, V argues that \u201cthe world doesn\u2019t need a building, it needs an idea\u201d\u2014patently ignoring the\u00a0ideas<\/em>\u00a0of common law and representative democracy that very building embodies. Thus we are brought to V\u2019s conclusion: By destroying the betrayed institutions of democracy, somehow, the people will regain their freedom.<\/p>\n

This is an obscenity to anyone who remembers his World War II history. From Parliament\u2019s halls, Winston Churchill rallied Britons in their \u201cfinest hour\u201d to face down Hitler\u2019s Third Reich on the eve of the Battle of Britain. In their sick revision, however, the Wachowskis defeat the Nazis by\u00a0leveling Parliament<\/em>\u2014never mind the fact that the Nazis\u00a0burned down the Germans\u2019 Reichstag<\/em>\u00a0to consolidate power.<\/p>\n

Despite V\u2019s pompously vague appeals to the power of ideas, all that viewers are left with is a lot of the moral relativity piffle that leftist professors are so fond of quoting, to the effect that \u201cone man\u2019s terrorist is another man\u2019s freedom fighter.\u201d Substitute the World Trade Center and the Pentagon for Old Bailey and Parliament, and you\u2019ll get the drift of this sickening allegory.<\/p>\n

Or, to drive the point closer to home, substitute, in Parliament\u2019s place, Columbine High School in suburban Denver. Before the murderous rage in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris massacred twelve schoolmates and a teacher, they produced an amateur video glorifying their school\u2019s wanton and nihilistic destruction.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, they took their own sorry lives immediately thereafter. Imagine what cinematic epics Klebold and Harris might have scripted from their prison cells. Their insane musings wouldn\u2019t have looked much different from this nauseating waste of celluloid.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 V for Vapid [xrr rating=2\/5] V for Vendetta. Starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, and John Hurt. Screenplay by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Directed by James McTeigue. Warner Bros., 2005, Color, 132 min. MPAA Rating: R. V for Vendetta, the latest installment of the Wachowski brothers\u2019s downward slide into formulaic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,35,52,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","category-dramas","category-graphic-novel-adaptations","category-mreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":510,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}