V for Vendetta

The Work:
V for Vendetta

The Artist(s):
Directed by the James McTeigue. Written by the Wachowski brothers. Starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Steven Rea, Steven Fry, John Hurt.

Description:
Critic: In a dystopic near future, Brittania groans under the yoke of a totalitarian regime whose leaders rose to power amid threats of terrorism and biological warfare. Evey (Natalie Portman) is a young everywoman who is saved from her attackers by mysterious stranger named “V” (Hugo Weaving). Evey is pulled deeper and deeper into a world of violence and revenge as she tries to evade government agents who believe that she is in league with the mysterious V.

Consumer: I think it’s easier to say that Natalie Portman is in trouble, and leave it at that.

Critic: If that’s what the movie meant to you…

Purpose:

Consumer: Well, yeah. This is a movie that gets Natalie Portman in trouble and then you wonder how she’s going to get out. There’s lots of explosions and killing, good guys die and bad guys die, they lay out a bunch of roses on the corpses and more things blow up.

Critic: It’s part social commentary, part political manifesto, part love story, part action movie, part philosophical exploration. It’s a lot of parts that are supposed to add up, I suppose, to a new kind of epic genre. My guess is the Wachowski brothers will always be chasing the magical convergence of these elements as we saw them in the original Matrix.

What Works:

Critic: I don’t know, frankly. There are brief moments that work, here and there. I found myself sporadically caught up in a scene or a sequence of scenes, but it wasn’t sustained…

Consumer: Can I interrupt? Can’t we talk about Natalie Portman? In twenty years, that’s all anyone will care about anyway. If you’re a heterosexual male or a homosexual female (nothing wrong with that) rent it for Natalie Portman. Don’t bother worrying about the rest of the stuff. She doesn’t show much skin, but she suffers awesomely and gets her head shaved. Unfortunately the head-shaving doesn’t inspire her to kick ass like Sigourney Weaver in Alien or Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, but...

Critic: (sniffs) Natalie Portman is quite fetching. There, are you happy? However I have to say that I don’t think Ms. Portman is half as good here as she was in The Professional.

Consumer: Yeah, she was awesome in The Professional, but she was only like twelve years old, so I’ve always felt kind of pervy talking about that movie.

Critic: Sounds like a personal problem.

What Doesn't Work:
Critic: It’s a pretentious, bloated, rip-off of a movie, a bad pastiche of 1984, Count of Monte Cristo, The Matrix, Darkman, need I go on? The Wachowski brothers’ imagery is often cheaply derivative (see the silly government sets with the chancellor raving on a big screen TV) and their ham-handed dialog is cheaper. V is makes preposterous, pseudo-philosophical statements about the loss of fear while Evey squints and nods as if she’s struggling, like the rest of us, to make sense of this mess. There’s a confusing subplot about medical experimentation that looks as if it was cribbed literally, image for image, from the Dachau museum. Watching this movie, you often feel like someone is changing channels on a television while superimposing Evey and V, puppetlike, on the screen. I half expected to find a subplot about getting rich in real estate or to see a shot of Christie Brinkley working out with the Total Home Gym.

Consumer: It’s true, I have to admit it. But Natalie Portman is hot. Come on.

Critic: Okay, I’ll admit she is rather comely, but something troubles me about her acting range, or lack thereof. Apparently her main talent is the ability to look worried. She works exclusively in that vein. She can take it from mildly perturbed to hysterical, sob-wracked anxiety, but the worried face is always at the foundation of her performances. If you look back, you can see she’s been doing this in all her films. I would submit that she's the Talia Shire of her generation.

Verdict:
Consumer: Your analysis has tired me out. I say see it for Natalie Portman, the knives, and the explosions. And stop thinking so much.

Critic: Yes, Consumer, that’s precisely what Hollywood wants you to do, stop thinking so much! Ironically, it’s flawed thinking that undoes this movie. The creators had a vision, but they lacked the mental stamina to forge all these pieces into a cohesive whole. The result? A mess. But, I will grant you, an entertaining mess. When it fails, it does so in such a spectacular fashion – for instance, Evey’s groan-inducing final speech – that you can’t help but watch. I’m going to say: Rent it, not to watch a success, but to watch a spectacular failure.

Consumer: I said the same thing in a lot fewer words.