Common Sense Note
Parents need to know the film includes recurring and explicit violence, including explosions, martial arts fights, knifings (with bloody results quite visible), shootings, and torture inside prison cells (where one character shares her space with a rat). The film opens with a flashback to a 1605 hanging, and then, in the present, an imminent rape (stopped by V's violent intervention). The film includes scenes of war and police state tactics, including the brutal incarceration of race and sexual minorities in Britain. A young girl sees her mother kidnapped by government flunkies, then witnesses a similar brutality as an adult. When a bishop arranges for sex with an underage girl (apparently a regular practice), he's killed as punishment (but not before he pushes his would-be girl victim onto his bed). Characters curse occasionally (infrequent use of the f-word, plus "bloody hell," "bitch," and the s-word).
Families can discuss the film's presentation of terrorism as reasonable response to state oppression. Is violence ever an appropriate response? How do the evil chancellor's raging and V's tragic background (abused and institutionalized as a child) make V's cause seem sympathetic, even if it's illegal and aggressive? How does Evey's own childhood loss of her parents make her ready to be V's protégé? For fans of the book, families can discuss the differences between the film and its inspiration.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
More generic action movie than philosophical investigation, V FOR VENDETTA focuses on a young woman's political education. The underlying, irresolvable question that drives Evey (Natalie Portman) has to do with terrorism: why and how are people pushed to commit it, and what might it achieve, aside from fear and oppression? Can calculated violence, ever, as its proponents argue, lead to "freedom"?
The terrorist at the center of film is V (Hugo Weaving, performing beneath a mask throughout). Inspired by Guy Fawkes, a Catholic who plotted to blow up Parliament in 1605, V asserts his own cause, set against the current British government, headed by the dictatorial Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt) and policed by the aptly named Chief Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith), with daily media indoctrination handled by the "voice of London," the egotistical TV personality Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), former jackboot cop and pharmaceuticals manipulator.
All these villains make V look comparatively heroic, a moral imbalance set up early in the film, when Evey, out after curfew, is about to be raped by some bad cops: V appears, kills them with his flashing knifework, and initiates his instruction of the vulnerable Evey: "An idea can still change the world," he says, while showing her the latest manifestation of his idea, blowing up the Old Bailey, in order to inspire followers and frighten his enemies.
The film is careful not to show anyone hurt by V's spectacular explosions (though it does reveal the effects of his hand-to-hand combat, against deserving bullies). His rage is fueled by the usual superhero's trauma (childhood abuse and institutional cruelty). This eventually leads to a grisly fire from which he emerges literally burning. "What was done to me was monstrous," V tells Evey, even as she is, at first, appalled by his own violent responses, noting, "And they created a monster."
While the movie allows that torture only reproduces terrorism and violence, it also presents V's scheme as revolutionary and effectively symbolic. While V is hunted by a decent cop Finch (Stephen Rea), he keeps Evey at his secret lair, where he makes her tea and eggs for breakfast. Her eventual escape only leads her to a more awful place, imprisoned and tortured (she also reads a lesbian prisoner's life story, scribbled onto toilet paper, inspiring Evey to survive. At last, she admits, she is no longer afraid to die. And in this, she finds what V calls "freedom."
Such heavy-handed pronouncements exemplify the film's distrust of viewers to interpret what they see, making V's political and social commentary seem more cartoonish than insightful. Yes, imperialism is really bad, and yes, Nazi-ish iconography is a sure sign of a regime's need for change. What's less clear, and could use some reflection, is how V's violent acts will or will not produce more victims and vigilantes. "Freedom and justice are more than words," he says, "They are perspectives." And as such, they need rethinking at every step.
Families who like this movie might also like other movies about retaliating victims of the state, like The Matrix or X-Men, the Hughes brothers' From Hell (also based on an Alan Moore comic), or 1984, starring John Hurt as the hero fighting against Big Brother.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentAn elderly bishop arranges to have sex with underage girl (the actual girl is only pretending to be that young; gay character discusses being closeted as "wearing a mask." |
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ViolenceViolence includes a hanging, explosions, knife and martial arts attacks, shootings, and scenes of torture, invasions of homes, war scenes on background televisions; bloody smears on walls; police are threatening and militaristic; threatened rape; murder by poisoning; man's figure appears burning during building fire; image of girl's mother dragged away by bad cop); discussion of epidemic fatal virus. |
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LanguageChatty terrorists use some profanity (including at least one f-word, and infrequent uses of "bloody hell," "damn," "bitch," s-word). |
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Social BehaviorPrimary terrorist justifies his violence as resistance to the completely corrupt state. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoBar scene shows drinking. |
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