V for Vendetta

For about the first half of its 132-minute running time, Andy and Larry Wachowski's "V for Vendetta" comes breathtakingly close to becoming the modern satirical political thriller we've been waiting for.

As long as it's busy bringing "1984" up to date, complete with characters who are only too familiar with button-pushing words like "rendition" and repressive institutions like The Ministry of Objectionable Material, it's sharp and funny. Only when it succumbs to the "Phantom of the Opera" aspects of its plot does it turn slack and shallow.

Loosely based on Alan Moore's 1989 graphic novel, the script follows an activist's child, Evey (Natalie Portman), who works at a government-controlled television network in fascist, futuristic England (the United States, which once "had everything," has plunged into civil war that has given it the international status of a leper colony). It's her transformation, from slave to rebel, that drives the story.

Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt) rules the country by fear alone, banning the Koran, turning homosexuals and Muslims into scapegoats, and suggesting Hitler at his most hysterical. His chief cheerleader is Lewis Prothero, "the voice of London" (Roger Allam), who suggests an unholy, British-accented mixture of several right-wing American talk-show hosts.

Evey's life changes forever one night when a masked avenger, known as "V" (Hugo Weaving), saves her from gang rape. Later she helps him complete an act of terrorism against the government, and he brings her home to his "Phantom"-style underground lair. But she can't go along with his habit of killing off the people he despises, and she flinches when he assigns her to help him with an assassination.

Of course she can't go back to her old life, so she moves in with a closeted-gay television personality, Deitrich (Stephen Fry), who reminds her of the qualities she admires in "V." When Deitrich goes too far, outrageously mocking Sutler on his television show, she wonders if everything's a joke to him.

"Only things that matter," he replies before he's hauled away by Sutler's storm troopers. Fry, who once played Oscar Wilde, gives the line a fetchingly classical spin. Weaving does the same for the Shakespearean quotes "V" sprinkles throughout his scenes.

At moments like these, "V for Vendetta" soars. Unfortunately, after Deitrich disappears from the picture, the movie loses much of its momentum and goes off in several directions at once. It tries to accommodate too many narratives, including back stories for "V" and Evey, and a tragic lesbian romance that might have been quite affecting if it didn't seem like a detour.

The Wachowski brothers, who co-directed one memorable lesbian film ("Bound") as well as "The Matrix" (and its unfortunate sequels), wrote "V" but handed over the directing reins this time to James McTeigue (who did assistant-director work on all three "Matrix" films). He handles the actors well, especially Portman, Fry and Stephen Rea (as an obsessed cop), and he provides some "Matrix"-style kicks, especially during the slow-motion finale.

He's perhaps most successful at suggesting an Orwellian world of never-ending war, government-controlled news and pointless confrontation, in which people are "afraid all the time."

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