|
qkg:contextText
|
As a fix of pop iconography, V for Vendetta is eyeball grabbing, even if it lacks the relentless videogame bravura that sold the Matrix films. As a movie, however, it's merely okay, with a pivotal dramatic weakness: Evey, for all the attentions of her revolutionary Svengali, remains, in essence, a bystander, and Portman, her head shaved, plays her like Joan of Arc as a tremulous Girl Scout. There's one startling sequence in which the chancellor's fake appearance on a variety show becomes a black-as-midnight Benny Hill sketch. There's also a down-the-rabbit-hole flourish — it has to do with Evey's confinement and torture — that would bend your mind a lot more if the film did what it appears, for a moment, to be doing: cast V in a morally ambiguous light. But he remains the saintliest of guerrillas, a Batman who realizes Gotham is too dirty to be cleaned up and must be blown up instead. (it) |
