As entertainment, V For Vendetta fires on nearly all cylinders, to whit: several buildings explode; there’s a masked hero; a beautiful, if not necessarily fatal, femme; some shootouts; some knife fights; some witticisms; and, for those who like a teaspoon of high culture with their evening out, the Bard is quoted more than once. In short, to quell the fears of movie-goers (like me) made gunshy by the bloated slabs of nothingness that were parts two and three of the Matrix trilogy, relax. We may never know why the brothers Wachowski screwed up so monumentally after making something so fun and original, but, in partnership with director James McTeigue, they’ve come back with an effective vector for popcorn. I promise that nobody soliloquizes about programming binaries for half an hour in a room made of thousands of televisions; there are no underground crowds with perfectly distributed melanin ratios, dancing to the world-beat; on the other hand (and unfortunately, in my view) Monica Bellucci makes absolutely no appearance in Vendetta.

So, it’s watchable. Now on to the bigger question – is it as good as it wants to be? Because this is a movie with aspirations. Certain filmmakers chafe at being mere entertainers. After a while, even being thought-provoking isn’t enough. Fired up by various bits of cultural theory that enumerate the vast powers of media, these freedom-fighters cleverly disguised as millionaire corporate lackeys, yearn to use their enormous puissance to actually start the revolution. Can it be done? Can you use glossy production values to sugar-coat a call-to-arms? This is a question for which I have no answer. I tend to think it’s a bit like putting a warning on a big mac package saying “This is carcinogenic! Blow up McDonalds!” Because everything that goes into the making and marketing of a big-budget mainstream release like V for Vendetta participates in, and requires, the structure that it critiques.
We know that the Wachowski brothers read the Situationists, a cadre of 1960’s French theorists whose sophisticated philosophy I will shamelessly boil down to the following dictum: all of western society lives inside an advertisement for itself, divorced from reality. The first Matrix film can be seen as an elaborate and very entertaining allegory for this idea, albeit vulnerable to the criticism that it celebrates (via CGI) the very technology and ideology that it attacks. We know this because the Wachowskis left abundant hints, most tellingly, in an early scene in The Matrix where Neo can be seen reading a book by Jean Beaudrillard, a latter day Situationist.

In this light, it’s interesting to compare The Matrix and V For Vendetta in terms of their historical contexts. The Matrix, made in the waning years of the Clinton Administration, nicely reflects the cushioned unease of the era, the vague sense that something was rotten, but we couldn’t smell it. Nothing was quite real and while a million children died in Iraq thanks to sanctions, while free trade broke the backs of the global underclass, the developed world floated on the sibilant rivers of Clinton’s rhetoric, the absurd shadow-boxing of his impeachment. Then came Bush, and the velvet glove was ripped off to reveal the naked fist of imperialism. Vendetta responds in kind.

Whereas The Matrix was, I think, a darker film, I have to give V for Vendetta it’s due for having the balls to advocate guerrilla terrorism as a perfectly reasonable response to state-sponsored terror. It’s doesn’t pull it’s punches, and the fact that Warner Brothers was willing to spend buckets of money on such a project, tells us something about the changing spirit of the age. Maybe.

In any case, recognizing that I’ve written almost nothing about the film under review, suffice it to say that the Wachowskis like their allegories, and Vendetta is a thin one. The gist is that the U.S. war in Iraq expands to Syria and elsewhere, bankrupting the States – chaos ensues, only Britain, led by a Hitler stand-in (played by the always reliable John Hurt) stands firm, instituting a fascist government that bears unsurprising resemblances to Orwell’s vision of 1984. The fascist regime employs nightmarish experiments to gain power, but these experiments spawn it’s nemesis, who shows up in a Guy Fawkes mask. Fawkes may be unfamiliar to North American viewers, but, in brief, he tried to blow up Parliament in the 1600’s. The fact that he was a bit player in a struggle between Catholic and Protestant aristocrats hasn’t stopped Fawkes from becoming a symbol of underdog rebellion down the ages. Anyway, this mask-wearer calls himself V, and he starts blowing stuff up because he doesn’t like the fascists. He’s played by Hugo Weaving, who was Mr. Smith in The Matrix, --Elrond in The Lord of the Rings and a transvestite in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in other words, a most versatile and chameleonic scenery-chewer. He’s excellent, as usual, all the more impressive, since he’s masked throughout. V is bent on VENGEANCE. And also, as a sideline, he wants to exhort the masses to revolt. He’s a loquacious superhero, fond of alliteration and quoting Shakespeare et al. He lives alone in a gothic lair stuffed with pre-Fascist cultural artifacts.

Now, along comes Nathalie Portman (sporting a British accent that wavers like a Union Jack in a Long Island breeze) and she teaches him the importance of, what’s that? Yes, love.

The fact that V and Portman meet, that she works at the very media outlet that V intends to blow up next, that she happens to have another mentor who’s also fond of egg-in-the-basket for breakfast, these are not coincidences – because the Wachowskis, despite their manifest iconoclasm, ascribe to a basic Hollywood piety, which is: there are no coincidences. Also known as, everything happens for a reason. Why this has become a commonplace in mainstream movie fare is simple: these films all rely on heavily plotted outcomes; and since plot is, in essence, a form of paranoia (i.e. everything leads in one direction and no matter where the hammer falls it hits the same nail on the head) within the paranoid logic of these films, the piety is absolutely true, there are no coincidences and everything has happened for a reason; because, in this instance, the Wachowskis wrote it that way. Still, it’s irritating to have this sort of thing thrown around as an excuse for the conjunction of two or three or seventy-five otherwise random elements. Saying that these aren’t coincidences simply because there are no coincidences strikes me as a bit cheap. Especially if you’re getting paid many millions of dollars to sort it all out.

In light of the above, one last bit of carping: there’s an interlude in the second half of the movie during which Portman’s character is jailed and tortured. Her performance is convincing but the resolution of the scenario is jaw-droppingly preposterous and involves the very regrettable line, “This may be the most important moment of your life, commit to it.” There ought to be a board of censors who delete such pseudo-profundities so that audiences aren’t forced to cringe with embarrassment when they hear them.

All that said, I liked V For Vendetta, and I’d see it again. It’s rare that a blockbuster film comes along that’s so ambitious. So, whether you feel like sitting back and soaking up the spectacle, or nerdily chewing over arcane tidbits of French cultural theory, this movie is for you. And a film that can straddle those target audiences is a rare thing. But, apropos said French tidbits: Guy Debord, arch-Situationist, wrote that we should strive not for the negation of style, but for the style of negation. Guy (come to think of it, is the Guy of Guy Fawkes a little homage to Debord?) is, I think, turning in his grave, or maybe he's just nodding sadly - V and Matrix are the apotheoses of his darkest prophecies: evidence that revolutionary thought and effort, even his, can and will be subsumed by the insatiable maw of the commercial Spectacle.