This movie got a horrible reception when it came out, and I have to concur in that I really couldn't recommend it to anybody. However, it had a lot of merits, or perhaps more accurately, a lot of potential. The story of disobedience and revolt by the population of an authoritarian regime was extremely captivating. The importance of symbolism, fear, the way a population forgets history, and how any show of disrespect can undermine the authority of a regime, were all near perfect in their presentation, and with a surprisingly light touch, given some of the controversies invoked by the film.
What makes it ineffective is in a word, Hollywood, primarily through the casting. Any peripheral scene, or any scene where no credited cast member has a spoken line, is enthralling. When Stephen Fry and the girl with the glasses take off their masks at the end of the film, I nearly shed tears. The authoritarian regime is presented reasonably competently, if not terribly interestingly, with Stephen Rea's Inspector Finch the lone highlight as a man with the intelligence to dig deeper into his society's workings but not the courage or imagination. Stephen Fry I felt was absolutely perfect as the dilettante rebel, keeping illegal cultural artifacts and engaging in minor subversions well below the public radar, but believing nothing serious will ever happen to him.
Unfortunately, the lead actors are truly the stone that sinks this movie, by being such predictably poor casting choices. I even like the actors, Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, but they just don't have nearly the right presence. Casting Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond is obviously the Hollywood's need for everybody to be young and photogenic, but for Portman it comes out as wilting and fragile, and so exceedingly pliable and vulnerable, that she can't sell the transformation to fearless rebel. She really can't hold the screen with much better actors around her, and this kills a lot of scenes, having no real interaction between her character and others. It's still hard to even take her seriously as an adult, which worked exceedingly well for Closer where everybody pushes her around and talks down to her level, and was great when she was at her acting peak around age 12-13, but falls pretty far short here. Her English accent seems like a transparent affection, and in addition to being distracting, makes her again seem like the American kids who go to Oxford and try to assume a new identity, which again makes her seem like an adolescent. The other contenders for the role, Bryce Dallas Howard and Scarlett Johansson, I feel might have brought some more adult qualities to the role.
Hugo Weaving's breathless, otherworldly speaking voice may have contributed to the fact that he's best known for playing an elf and a computer program, but here it makes it hard to see that under the mask and the grandiose symbolism, V is just a pained, twisted man. This adds a lot when it does occasionally manage to poke through, so it would have been nice to see more of it. As it is, with nothing visible underneath in Weaving's performance, V comes across as a ridiculous shell, most clearly in the scene where V destroys the Old Bailey, and is standing on a rooftop with Evey reveling in the destruction. With his impassive Guy Fawkes mask, and just the black gloved hands sticking out of his flowing black cloak, and a low wall in front of him, he looked like a reject from that castle Trolley used to visit on Mr. Rogers, with the little puppets of King Friday and Prince Tuesday. It was incredibly hard to take him seriously after that, especially when he's making eggs and toast while wearing a grinning mask. If the original actor cast for the role, James Purefoy, had stuck through the film, I feel like he would have given a much better impression of a man under the mask, which is what the film needs to make V real and not ridiculous.
The film also makes great use of music, but again, Hollywood needs a dramatic score with violins playing to let them know what emotion to feel, and this is distractingly bland and cliche. Dario Marinelli's score really can't stand next to the songs that close the film, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and the Stones' Street Fighting Man, both of which are what the movie really called for. I also can't go without mentioning Dynamite Ham's "BKAB" featuring Malcom X and Gloria Steinem that apparently kept a lot of people glued to their seats during the closing credits. But it's classical music, political techno, and a song from two generations back, all of which I can see making nervous suits say "You didn't even give them a good bang at the end so they'd know
when to clap!"
This is also interesting in that it's the third Stephen Rea film I've seen, and like Colin Firth is always playing Mr. Darcy, he always seems to be channeling the spirit of Ned Broy. In "Michael Collins" he plays Ned Broy, an Irish policeman who becomes an informant for the Republicans after starting to listen to Collins, in "The Crying Game" he's an IRA volunteer who quits after conversing with a British soldier, and in "V for Vendetta" he's again a policeman who starts to question the regime after listening to V. He's also a Belfast Protestant who had three children with an IRA bomber who was part of the Dirty Protest and hunger strikes. Kind of interesting to find a Presbyterian from Belfast who keeps playing revolutionaries.
