V FOR VENDETTA

[NOTE: Reviewed together with 'Final Destination 3', which is why I went for this not-especially-obvious cinematic downers angle. Though I did find the film quite sombre, for a multiplex movie.]

What a downer! ‘I don’t want to be depressed,’ friends demur when I suggest they watch some French movie about relationships – so instead they grab a tub of popcorn and head for something like V for Vendetta, little knowing what a grim, glum experience they’ve let themselves in for. I can see the majority of multiplex patrons wishing themselves out of this movie long before its two-hour-plus running time grinds to a finish; those few who like it, however, may find themselves marked by it, especially if they’re young and impressionable. As with last year’s Sin City, I can see people coming out of this thinking: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before!’.

 Not true, of course; the film isn’t original – it’s based on a graphic novel, a.k.a. comic-book – and even the source isn’t original, heavily indebted to 1984. Here’s the dystopian future, ruled by a stentorian dictator (who only appears on screens and posters, Big Brother-style) and his Politburo of lieutenants. There are modern touches, TV as the opiate of the masses and a government adept at spin-doctoring – when the Old Bailey is bombed (the film is set in London), the media pass off the explosion as a planned demolition, joking that the contractors used a little too much dynamite – but in fact there should be more modern touches. Old-style dictatorship is out of fashion; the new style is closer to Huxley’s Brave New World, people not so much cowed as distracted with sex and consumer goods. V for Vendetta looks drab, like England circa 1960. In real life, these Londoners would’ve moved to Provence years ago.

 To be fair, the film is set in a time when war and civil strife have turned much of the planet into a hellhole, implicitly allowing Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt) to establish his police state. Indeed, our hero is a terrorist – the eponymous ‘V’, who hides his deformed face behind a Guy Fawkes mask, though British eyes may roll when Fawkes is described as a “great citizen” (it’s like when the guy in Hostel said there aren’t many men left in Slovakia “because of the war”). Siding with terrorists is just one of the film’s controversial strokes, another being its conspicuous sympathy for gay characters: a vile talk-show host fulminates against homosexuals in the same breath as Muslims and terrorists, a sympathetic artist (Stephen Fry) is secretly gay, while V’s vendetta is inspired – it turns out – by the fate of a lesbian inmate at the Lankhill prison camp, where grisly experiments were carried out.

 Lankhill has obvious echoes of Nazi concentration-camps – including their most famous image, a pit full of emaciated bodies – boldly (albeit indirectly) linking those images to Bush’s America, another place, increasingly, where “different became dangerous”. One assumes this was quite a personal project for the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame), one of whom is a transsexual; they wrote the script but entrusted the direction to former assistant James McTeigue, possibly not wanting to be associated too strongly with something so weird. V is a weird kind of hero, and not just because he never takes off his mask. He wears an apron, likes old black-and-white movies and talks like an intellectual – or like The Architect in the Matrix sequels, using words like “auspicious” and “sobriquet” (he especially likes words that begin with ‘V’). “Words will always retain their power,” he asserts, but not when they’re used so verbosely. The surfeit of talk makes V for Vendetta heavy going, especially in the early scenes.

 The film starts to grip as the truth about Lankhill slowly emerges (Stephen Rea is reliably fine as a dogged police inspector), and it grips hard. You may gag on your popcorn as prison-camp images pile up, V takes revenge on the ringleaders – including a pedophile priest and a woman scientist who begs him to kill her – and heroine Natalie Portman struggles with nightmares of her parents’ arrest. She also gets her head shaved and is thrown into a dungeon in the film’s middle section (when V disappears from the plot) while conspiracies emerge and guilty secrets proliferate. The ‘happy’ ending has thousands of citizens in Guy Fawkes masks thronging the streets while most of the cast lie dead and the Houses of Parliament go up in flames (you’d have to go back to Fight Club (1999) for a more cathartic explosion). The terrorists win, of course.