When first we meet the masked hero—or possibly the antihero—of V for Vendetta, he seems to have wandered into the film's dystopian vision of near-future London directly from a Douglas Fairbanks picture of a century before. Saucy and debonair in his billowing cloak, wide-brimmed top hat and sneering Guy Fawkes rictus, V, as he calls himself, quickly dispatches three government-issue thugs who are preparing to have their way with Evey (Natalie Portman), a young woman they've caught roaming the streets after curfew. "Who was that masked man?" the grateful, shaken near-victim now traditionally wonders, as the savior in question abruptly vanishes from sight. Not this time. Having spared Evey from a physical assault, V merely substitutes a verbal one, rattling off an ostentatious exercise in gratuitous alliteration: With the exception of conjunctions and prepositions, virtually every word he utters begins with his favorite letter. (Guess.) I gather this speech is intended to come across as witty and playful—street poetry that tapers to a knife point—but the image it inevitably conjures is of some dude hunkered down with his Merriam-Webster, working out how to cram "vanquish," "vicinity" and "vinaigrette" into a single comprehensible sentence.
In any case, pay no attention to the sputtering of various critics and pundits to the effect that V for Vendetta glorifies terrorism. Even if you're not inclined to giggle at V's vociferous volleys of verbiage, it's abundantly clear that the Wachowski Brothers, who produced and wrote the screenplay (directing chores were awarded to their assistant on the Matrix films, James McTeigue), view the character with a mixture of admiration and revulsion. Taking his cue from Fawkes, V plans to send Parliament crumbling to the ground, a symbolic blow against the tyranny of Britain's neofascist government (led by a dyspeptic John Hurt, who's seen almost exclusively as a ranting, Big Brotheresque disembodied head on TV monitors). But while V's outrage is justifiable, it doesn't follow that the movie approves of his method. Indeed, the means by which he wins over the heretofore apolitical Evey to his cause amount to indoctrination at best, brainwashing at worst. V for Vendetta presents the case for violence as a necessary evil, but it also employs a patent lunatic as its mouthpiece. Only in a climate where Bill Maher is pilloried merely for saying the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards could such a stance be perceived as uncritical or irresponsible, rather than questioning.
I wish I could tell you that this bold, provocative attempt at wrestling with our current demons—a commendable risk for a major studio like Warner Bros.—makes for superb art, or at least splendid entertainment. Unfortunately, V for Vendetta is just the least embarrassing movie to date adapted from the work of legendary comics writer Alan Moore. Not that you'll find Moore's name anywhere in the credits. Disgusted by what he perceives as the bastardization of his work, he's completely disassociated himself from the project; in a recent New York Times interview, he dismissed the Wachowskis' screenplay as "rubbish." (David Lloyd, the original comic's illustrator, supports the film.) And while Vendetta-the-movie never sinks to the laughable depths of From Hell (2001) or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), you can still sense a surfeit of heady ideas receiving only the most cursory of exploration. Moore's writing couldn't be further from, say, the pungent, staccato rhythms of a Frank Miller, who adapted his own Sin City almost verbatim. Moore's work is dense, allusive, prodigiously literary—often constructed as a series of parallel narratives that almost imperceptibly converge, or as a Chinese puzzle box of stories within stories. Try to stuff all that into two hours and what you wind up with is E for Exposition.
Also, there's the wee problem of the dude in the mask. In the context of a graphic novel, where all the images are motionless and dialogue comes in the form of word balloons (or Moore and Lloyd's stark text-box equivalent), this is an inspired idea. Onscreen, some poor actor—in this case, The Matrix's Hugo Weaving, who took over for James Purefoy midway through production; both appear in the finished film—has to perform an extended act of what amounts to full-body puppetry, using his own muscles as strings. Just a few days ago, I happened to watch Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1966 film The Face of Another, which suggests that a man deprived of expression ceases to be human. V for Vendetta demonstrates that a movie character deprived of expression amounts to little more than a mocking cartoon.