V For Vendetta

Avid readers of our great site will have clocked, in our recent rundown of grade-boundaries, that F-graded films are rare...

Well, V is almost one. Very almost. It's actually just a piece of subjective prejudice that keeps it at D- and if you want to know why, you'll just have to read on...

This film is completely hopeless from start to finish and pretty much everything about it is atrocious. It's actually very difficult to review films as bad as this because you have very little interesting to say and that is as big an indictment of a film as they come really.

Natalie Portman is as god-awful as her accent, the normally brilliant Hugo Weaving is incredibly annoying as the hero you couldn't care less about, the chemistry is terrible between the two leads, the plot is garbled and unclear (if timely, I'll come back to that), the dialogue is among the worst I've ever had the misfortune to sit through and the boring, predictable, violence serves no point whatsoever. Utter garbage.

As you can probably tell, I'm not the Wachowski brothers biggest fan. They dress up cliched and pretentious in a ridiculous cloak of intelligence draped in pointless violence that achieves nothing. The result is that a would-be interesting point is lost somewhere in the vast terrains of egotistical nonsense they heap on us. I've seen three films they've been involved in and they'd score D+, F, C+ and... well you'll just have to wait and see.

And I really can't tell you how irritating "V" - the 'hero' - is. Two or three minutes in you are already desperate to smack him in his grinning mouth. Would breeze into my top 20 worst characters ever depicted on screen.

Look at him! Don't you just want to smack him?

The long and the short of all this is that this is a hopeless, awful, film that has nothing to recommend it at all and I would seriously advise all to ignore like the plague. It is, therefore, completely and fully deserving of an...

F

But...

I'm a lefty and this film, does, at least, make a couple of relevant points about the society in which we live. I did, the next day, catch myself thinking about the nice way it suggests a revolution can be brought about by a symbolic firework (so to speak), and it does make a point about the facistic levels of immigration control and immigration policy in 21st Century Britain, so, because of that I'm going, purely on the basis of subjective prejudice which got me thinking about it again the next day, give it a very very generous:

D- Or perhaps that should be "V for Very (Very) Bad"

BTW, this is voted number #144 on IMDB's list of all-time great movies. How is that possible? I genuinely am stumped, this is a completely awful film from start to finish. Even the guy who wrote the graphic novel disassociated himself from it. I don't blame him!