...er, righteo. I'm not going to pretend I completely "get" the new Wachowski brothers-written-and-produced movie V for Vendetta. I mean, I understand what they were getting at, but maybe it was my acute non-knowledge about Thatcher and about current US politics (that is, outside of the stuff I see on Australian news), so maybe I wasn't quite in on the act. Or, and this is what I suspect more, something got lost in the translation. Was the original graphic Novel by Alan Moore this merely moderately entertaining?
In some technical areas the film is a marvel. The production design by Owen Paterson (The Matrix trilogy, The Adventures of Priscilla...) is absolutely Oscar-worthy and the costume design is almost as good. Recent Oscar-nominee Dario Marianelli (Pride & Prejudice) gives a good appropriate score. However, things such as editing are completely wrong. Not only is the film too long, it needed to lose somewhere in the vacinity of 20 minutes. More even. And the action scenes (those that there are - more on that in a sec) are really confusing. The ones at the start are cut so frenetically that you can't see anything that the character of V is doing, and then in the big final fight sequence, it desolves into slow-motion so you can indeed see what he is doing, but the whole thing in slow-mo just feels, well, slow as well as pandering. I don't know how they could've gotten around it. It's a puzzle.
The pacing on the film is all wrong too. I'm not a "get to the 'splotions!" sorta guy, but in this movie I really wanted it to get to them quick smart. For a full hour or so nothing happens of any particular excitement. And then when it does get to the very end with the fire and explosions it's very... "so what?"
The acting to is a strange affair. Apart from Natalie Portman (and Stephen Fry's nose that puts in a valiant cameo in close-up) the performances range from meh to blah. John Hurt is frightfully continuing his current career path (with stuff like this, The Proposition, Hellboy and Skeleton Key recently I feel sorry). The previously mentioned Fry is alright I suppose, but Stephen Rea is a fightful bore, isn't he? Nobody particularly stands out from the crowd.
And that leads me to the films big main problem. The character of V. "Played" here by Hugo Weaving, I just had a big problem with everything about him. There's the strange performance by Weaving himself (is V meant to be this pseudo-fey terrorist?) and the way that his voice just seems to scarily hang in the air (not in the good way). And then there is the fact that his face is hidden by a mask the entire 2 hours+ running time. How are we not meant to laugh when the director has a close-up of V's "face" while he's giving a speech? Nothing's moving! You should at least focus on Natalie (or whoever's face we can see) to give us something. We might as well shut our eyes and listen on audiotape.I appreciate the film for what it was trying to do, but when it comes down to it I just didn't think it worked. Much like Spielberg's Munich, I don't think the two worlds of action-thriller mixed well with Moore's original political intent. Where Inside Man worked well as a thriller AND as a Spike Lee race drama, this one doesn't mix well. Moore's work seems to work on one level, while the Wachowski's and McTeigue work on another altogether. And they don't mesh. But, still, it's pretty. C-
Question: What was with all the homosexual stuff? Like, that big long lesbian sequence was really strange.
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