This Week's Hot Pick: 'V for Vendetta'

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

It's the strangest comic-book superhero movie -- the action is sparse, the pace is relatively slow, the effects are negligible, the hero's skills are impressive but hardly superhuman and it's closer to a paranoid 1970s political thriller than a "Batman" rip-off. Based on a 1980s graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, the story is set in a fascist England of the near future run by a maniacal dictator (John Hurt) who has suspended civil rights and suppressed the nation's various political, ethnic and sexual minorities.

V, the title character, is a knife-throwing, Shakespeare-quoting caped crusader who lives like the Phantom of the Opera in a subterranean "Shadow Gallery" surrounded by great paintings he has stolen from government censors.

In the course of the movie, V rescues a young woman (Natalie Portman) who becomes his ally and our point of view, assassinates a succession of despicable officials and plots to blow up the Houses of Parliament, in emulation of his 17th-century hero, Guy Fawkes.

The script (by "The Matrix's" Wachowski brothers) is sluggish and often confusing, the film never quite kicks in as a first-rate thriller, detective story or character study, and it's something of an endurance test. The hero (Hugo Weaving) wears a constantly smiling mask of Fawkes and we never see his face. It worked in the comic, but makes the film's many dialogue scenes seem agonizingly static.

However, the performances -- by Portman, Hurt, Stephen Fry and especially Stephen Rea -- are unusually delicate for a comic-book fantasy, first-time director James McTeigue has moments of inspiration and the film's operatic imagery of fascism has some genuine bite.

The DVD comes as a single disc and in a two-disc version with featurettes on making the movie, its artistic design, Fawkes' history, the story's comic book origins and a Cat Power montage. 132 minutes. Rated R for strong violence and some language. (William Arnold)

GRADE: B