for strong violence, and language.

March 17, 2006

By TOM MAURSTAD / The Dallas Morning News

V for Vendetta is yet another comic book turned into a big-screen, big-budget spectacle. Only this time, the movie is based on a comic book most people have never read inspired by a notorious figure in English history most people have never heard of.

But everybody has heard of the team behind the film – Alan and Larry, better known as the Wachowski brothers. When last we heard from them, they were busy with a little franchise we came to know as the Matrix trilogy. That legacy is a double-edged sword: They are the creators of one of the best science-fiction films and two of the worst sequels in film history. And you see plenty of both in this new project. This time around, the brothers share screenwriter and producer credits, but they hand off directing to their fellow Matrix alum, James McTeigue.

Warner Bros.

Hugo Weaving as "V" and Natalie Portman as "Evey" in "V for Vendetta."

Once again, the Wachowskis have constructed a near-future world in which pretty much everything has gone wrong. And while the oblivious masses sleepwalk through their lives, one man takes on The System and leads a revolution. Sound familiar? It should, only this time, the hero isn't a computer hacker named Neo, it's a terrorist named V (Hugo Weaving). And The System isn't a master race of machines, it's a totalitarian government headed by John Hurt's high chancellor. He's a leader who vacillates between spittle-flecked invectives and exhortations of "strength through unity and unity through faith." Any connections made between world leaders past or present are strictly intentional.

V for Vendetta opens by whisking us through a brief history of the next several years in which the "former United States" is ravaged by disease and civil war and England is now in the hands of an Orwellian government that restricts pretty much everything. Then we are introduced to Evey (Natalie Portman). Caught by a group of government thugs out after curfew, she is rescued by a man in a mask. He has lots of shiny knives and even more alliterative banter ("a vendetta held as a votive," "the verdict is vengeance" and so on). When he's not vamping about the vicissitudes of this and the vanity of that, he's quoting Macbeth or waxing philosophic, sounding less like a murderous terrorist than a hypercaffeinated grad student.

From an initial stance of distrust and confusion, Evey eventually becomes his beloved co-conspirator. We learn her back story and his through an annoying story-within-story style that connects everyone and everything. There are no such things as coincidences, we are often reminded. So she is the daughter of artist-activist parents, and he is the scarred freak of a secret prison and its biological experiments – imagine Neo and Morpheus' relationship, only with more romance and slow dancing.

The easy swipe at this movie is that it was better the first time around, when it was called The Matrix. Even if you don't know this project's problematic history – it was scheduled for release last November but held up after the terrorist bombings in London, where the movie is set – the present-future tensions are still here and there.

The central problem is that the world we currently live in has overwhelmed this film's conjured future. We don't need a movie to speculate on what it's like to live in a world driven crazy with fear by chaos and violence or the way that fear could be used to exploit and oppress us. We already live in that world – it's as if the Wachowski brothers have made their 1984, only they've released it in 1985.

Ms. Portman is an impressive heroine, somewhere between Sigourney Weaver's Ripley and Demi Moore's G.I. Jane. She does as much as she can with a script that puts her character in a series of ever sillier moments of solemnity. When she finally, momentously kisses V right on the lips of his mask, it verges on the ridiculous. Ditto when she is being baptized by the rain as the movie intercuts images of V emerging from a building in flames. See, she was reborn in water, he in fire, they're like opposites but really the same. It's called symbolism, dude.

Still, the film is visually stunning. There are beautifully choreographed fight scenes in which a bemasked Mr. Weaving puts all that kung-fu training from his Agent Smith days in Matrix to work – lots of whirling and kicking. And though it's the future and all the bad guys have guns, V uses knives, apparently because they just look so cool when they are spinning through the air. Unlike the virtual reality of The Matrix, the bad guys in Vendetta are flesh-and-blood and so plenty of both are sliced and spilled. That raises a moral question not provoked when killing computers; V rationalizes a bit about only killing those who deserve it, but the filmmakers don't get off that easy.

With a terrorist hero spouting lines such as "violence can be used for good" while blowing up buildings (which apparently have no custodial staff or other hapless collateral victims to fret over), V for Vendetta engages in lots of speechifying about the importance of ideas and the freedom to question them. Ironically, though, the movie doesn't really seem to have any ideas of its own.

But it is a super-cool, media-mad, pop confabulation in which things blow up with fireballs that light the sky. And viewers are free to go "whoa."