Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Dir: James McTeigue

Dir: James McTeigue

'V for Vendetta', or perhaps v for vainglorious is a puerile Blairite mishmash of a movie in which the USA has fallen into decline, but the tea drinking middle classes, or rather their cocaine snorting up-market equivalents, inhabit an Orwellian London of curfews, thuggish watchmen and security cameras. When a rebellious, or merely petulant tv presenter, 'V', decides to blow up a couple of government buildings, he does so behind a Guy Fawkes mask. Poor Guy Fawkes was the fall guy for the reactionary catholic recusant plotters who tried to bomb Parliament some centuries before, who is still burned in effigy on bonfires each November 5, a neat trick in which the pagan fires of All Souls Night were replaced by a political hate figure in English folk-lore.

An aesthete with a high opinion of his own wit, 'V', played by Hugo Weaving, gives the regime a year's warning of his intention to blow up Parliament. He has arranged for mass deliveries of masks to be made to London's unwary citizens in a mild attempt to stir up apathy.

Natalie Portman plays a nice middle class girl who is given a bit of a rough ride and there are a lot of worried policemen and a power crazed Prime Minister (John Hurt), who gets very angry, before being stiffed by his cronies. A rather unconvincing subplot, about experiments to create a population of passive clones, hardly seems necessary in a country that has already achieved much the same end by centuries of social conditioning.

The film is rather fun, a pacy pastiche, that shifts gear well between moments of tension and narrative elaboration, making good use of the 'fireworks' motif, as London's landmarks are blown up in satisfyingly convincing digital effects. Hopefully the creators of the comic book source for 'V for Vendetta' have made a lot of money from this production.