Review: V For Vendetta

Seeing The Dark Knight twice in the past two weeks made me hungry for more comic-based movie fare, and so we watched V For Vendetta on DVD this evening. I'd seen the film at the theatre when it came out in 2005 and have owned the DVD for awhile now, but hadn't gotten around to re-watching it until tonight.

As anyone who's seen my favourite comic stories of all time would know, V For Vendetta - the comic series - rates pretty high up there with me. In fact, the only work of that sort that I like better is Watchmen, which is also now in the process of being movie-ized even as we speak. Because of this, I'm probably harder on the film version of VFV than I maybe should be, but there you go. The reality is that the source material that the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue drew on in creating V For Vendetta - the film - is among the most intricate, dense and rewarding to be found in the "four colour medium." Given that, I'd say that what they put on the screen was a reasonable, though certainly not outstanding, distillation.

The scene that devastates me, every time I read the comic or (now) watch the film, is the one where Evey emerges from captivity. I wrote about how that revelation moves me elsewhere:

"But the shocker in that story, the one that put the whole tale in a different perspective for me, happened when Evey was released from her prison and wandered upstairs to find that her captor and tormentor had been V all along. The gravitas this turn of events lent to the larger canvas of VFV was incredible, for me at least. We knew full well how much V cared for Evey, so seeing the lengths he'd go to in order to, in his words, remove her blinders, was shocking and revelatory. I can still remember the sensation of reading those pages for the first time, realizing what had happened, and having tears run down my cheeks as it sunk in and everything changed. Definitely one of the most powerful scenes in comics history that I can think of."

And for their inclusion of that scene, as well as how beautifully they pulled it off - and all that leads up to it - I have to give the film-makers full credit. That aspect of the story works, and works well. Also effective are the shots of V doing his thing, and the progression of his relationship with Evey throughout.

Where the movie version fails, it seems to me, is in its choices to deviate from the blueprint laid out by the Alan Moore/David Lloyd comic. And I don't mean that simply from a purist point-of-view, although I'm sure it must seem that way. Rather, I think that our suspension of disbelief, which Moore is a master at playing with but never betraying, gets stretched past the breaking point with some of the coincidences and pleasantries that are introduced into the silver screen script. Having Evey work at the TV studio that V uses to broadcast his message, turning the citizens of London into V-wannabes, and even the plot near the end to turn one of the insiders against the "high chancellor" are all examples of Hollywood writing stomping all over something much better than that. Moore's story is full of ambiguous greys, unanswered questions and unsolvable mysteries... which I suppose someone decided just wouldn't be palatable to a movie-going audience.

What I think V For Vendetta accomplishes, though, is perhaps this: it may cause people to seek out the graphic novel upon which it was based ("Illustrated by David Lloyd," as the credits tell us, because Moore demanded that his name be removed from the film). If that happens, then those lucky souls will find a superior masterpiece that was only hinted at by this passably entertaining flick. And that's not a terrible outcome, indeed.

Rating: ***