V for Vendetta (2006)

Directed by: James McTeigue
Written by: The Wachowski Brothers
Starring: Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, John Hurt

There seems to be a trend these days, if you can call two instances a trend, of attractive young acresses shaving their heads for action roles. It's kind of like what John Stewart said at this year's Academy Awards about attractive older actresses like Charlize Theron "hagging it up" for Oscar nominations. In this case, the first example of the former trend was Bend It Like Beckham's Keira Knightly in the Tony Scott's atrocious Domino, which rivals Oliver Stone's Alexander for most inept treatment of potentially interesting characters (both were based on true characters).

The second film is Natalie Portman in the Wachowski Brothers' V for Vendetta. Fortunately, it wasn't as appallingly bad as Domino. Actually, I wouldn't exactly even call it a bad movie.

Set in England in the near future where a big brother-like dictator takes over the government and the United States is again embroiled in a civil war. Portman plays an assistant in a news office named Evey who is saved from the thuggish morality police when she is caught out on the streets after curfew by a masked man (Hugo Weaving) who calls himself V.

The mask he's wearing is a Guy Fawkes mask in tribute to the English Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605, in order to kill among others in Parliament, King James I who would later authorize the first official English translation of the Bible, which Catholics at the time were opposed to.

Evey is thus implicated, albeit unwillingly at first, in V's campaign to overthrow the English dictatorship, which will come to a head the following Fifth of November a date you will no doubt remember after the movie.

As a Friday night, blow $10 on a movie with some friends, action flick it worked though at 132 minutes it was quite longer than your typical Friday night fare. As an action movie, I did like the atmosphere, no doubt because it was based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore who also wrote "From Hell" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and the Guy Fawkes motif really worked for an action hero (despite the fact that I don't care much for the historical figure).

I was disappointed, however, that Natalie Portman didn't fight. I had a friend express surprise that I expected her to fight at all. She shaved her head, she might as well fight. Keira Knightly did it. Natalie fought in Star Wars, why not here?

So as a dumb action film, it was all right. The only problem with that is that it tried to do more than that. And I just didn't buy it intellectually.

First, the writers obviously don't know much about living in a society without the freedom of speech. There is a scene where a TV personality lampoons the dictator. After watching the program on TV in the comfort of his own home the secret police break in and arrest him. The problem with censorship is that the censors would stop the program before it went on the air. That's what censors are for. This kind of mistake seems typical of the kind of people that blather on and on about how there isn't any freedom of speech any more and you wonder if there wasn't freedom of speech how come you keep hearing about it all of the damned time. You almost wish a real dictator would take over just to shut them up.

Second, the writers fall down a slippery slope fallacy when they try too hard to make connections between contemporary events and their dystopic future. A war that America starts will inevitably lead to dictatorship in England it seems. Guantanamo Bay will inevitably lead to doing biological tests on prisoners. The Wachowski Brothers obviously aren't working with nuance here. They portray the Koran as contraband in a Christian theocratic dictatorship but there is no mention that without the war in which the dictator will inevitably rise to power, the Christian Bible could just as easily be banned in England the way it is in Saudi Arabia.

Anyway, are they portraying England as becoming a Christian Theocracy? That's like horror movie about French people working a forty hour week. Like that's ever gonna happen.

I have to admit, I've never been all that impressed by the Wachowski Brothers intellectually. I may be one of the only people in the world that thought The Matrix was overrated, which may sound like heresy. But maybe I can't take seriously any movie that Keanu Reeves is in. But I don't think the premise of the real world versus the perceived world was all that profound. Didn't Descartes cover that in the 17th Century? Cogito Ergo Sum, anybody?

Finally, there is the whole glorification of anarchy. I don't see much value in it. Maybe I've spent one too many nights in Barcelona, but I just think about a bunch of able-bodied kids living on the street shaking cups of change at you and calling that work. That's not how a society should be run. And I must admit that as somewhat of an anglophile, I was a little offended that that the destruction of a certain London landmark (think Chevy Chase in European Vacation) would be hailed as a good thing.

However, there must have been something about how it worked worked as an action film that despite the appalling final scene and the bad logic involved, I wouldn't call the filmg as a whole appallingly bad.

So Portman's still got one up on Knightly in that category.