Superhero Media: V for Vendetta (2006)

It's been quite a while since I reviewed the graphic novel, so I really probably left V for Vendetta a little long, but by Odin's beard, this is a great film. Dropping some of the more absurd elements of the comic, condensing the story and updating it, V for Vendetta is slick, fun and still manages to be really smart in a lot of places. As an anarchist myself, I definitely identify more with the V of the film than the comics, as there is a lot more focus on the people of England coming around to a more humanistic point of view and deciding to change, rather than being forced. Not that I'd recommend V for Vendetta, in any form as a grounding text for contemporary anarchist thought, check out The Accidental Anarchist for that. Back to this amazing film, how good is the cast? Rather than populating the leads with Hollywood actors, only Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman aren't major fixtures of British film and television, and both manage their accents and mannerisms perfectly. Hell, just how good is Weaving to get all that emotion through a mask and gloves for the entire film? 

There is a reliance on style and theme in V for Vendetta that can weaken the impact on subsequent viewings, for example, V's plan depends on everything going exactly the way he predicted, but I feel that viewing it as some kind of "grounded thriller" is missing the point. V for Vendetta needs to be at least somewhat "over the top", as telling a straight story about violently resisting fascism gets weirdly ignored, just like in real life, where people seem to think ANTIFA is a terrorist organisation, despite being anti-terror and not really an organisation in the political sense. Sorry about that, but I stumbled across a Hard-Right reading of V for Vendetta whilst researching it online and I'm both baffled and furious that V, who is a minority put into a death camp by a fascist military dictatorship and carves an inverted Anarchism symbol into a propaganda poster, is somehow resonating with morons who think universal health care is communism. Maybe we do need a humanist revolution after all... 

Probably my favourite part of V for Vendetta that people seem to forget is the Stephen Fry sequence where he's hosting a campy variety show and they run a little pantomime number with both Hugo Weaving and John Hurt. This is the kind of fun that doesn't seem to make it into too many American action films, even factoring in the lack of a panto tradition in the USA. I think those who didn't grow up with the level of exported British television that I did aren't always aware that essentially every British actor has done some combination of Shakespeare, Pantomime, Doctor Who and/or Midsummer Murders; it's actually a fun drinking game to take a shot every time an actor in a new programme has been killed in Midsummer Murders. That V for Vendetta is destined for Cult Classic status is obvious, but I think it deserves more than that, as a film, it's slick, smart and carries a humanist message that is pretty rare for big blockbusters.