film | Anarchy in the U.K.

If V FOR VENDETTA was a geographical landmark, it'd be all over the map. This resolutely visceral adaptation of the futuristic nightmare dystopia from Alan Moore's graphic novel is unapologetically theatrical, frequently rousing, quirky to a fault, bizarrely affecting, occasionally heavy-handed, vividly challenging and never less than rambunctiously entertaining. And yet behind the surface flash and mega-budget action and comic-book goodies you expect from writers/producers Andy and Larry Wachowski — the siblings behind the Matrix franchise — are honest-to-goodness ideas. Hell, the film is basically about the impervious power of honest-to-goodness ideas. But it also features a dude in a cool costume blowing up stuff. You know, if that's what you're looking for.

His name is simply V (Hugo Weaving, Lord of the Rings' elf king), and he anonymously swoops into the brutally totalitarian landscape of 2020s London in his Guy Fawkes mask, That Girl wig and Ninja-Turtle artillery concealed by a flowing black cloak (he's historical, he's pop-cultural, and he's fabulous!) to combat the conspiracies and machinations of the ultra-conservative government's Big-Brother figureheads while settling a few personal scores of his own. In an anarchist twist on The Phantom of the Opera, Natalie Portman plays his grateful/reluctant/sympathetic captive/ally/student, a gofer assistant for Britain's sole television network — federally owned and operated, of course — who V rescues from sexually aggressive patrol officers on a night she's out past the mandated curfew. (That Portman works in state-controlled TV news allows for audaciously funny jabs at extreme media spin.)

V is a hybrid of Zorro, Edmond Dantès, Errol Flynn's Robin Hood and those cunning Euro-trash bad guys from every Die Hard knock-off ever made — not quite a full-tilt hero in the traditional sense. So is V also for villain? Nah, he's more of an equal-opportunity antagonist; the movie portrays him with empathy and unmistakably takes his side, but usually (without giving anything away) in intriguing shades of gray, ash and heather. By definition, sure, he's a terrorist, but then, in theory, his omnipotent politician adversaries — led by Alien's John Hurt as Great Britain's sputteringly nasty dictator — are also. Essentially, if V's a monster, he was created by much scarier ones.

With Weaving hidden behind an immobile harlequin faceplate and speaking in an exaggerated vaudevillian lilt, Vendetta attempts to give V a flesh-and-blood accessibility in the odd whimsical moment that pushes the film's admittedly loose tone a step too far. (V seems less ... badass vigilante after you watch him mundanely poach eggs on toast while "The Girl from Ipanema" softly hums on a nearby jukebox.) No matter. Portman supplies the human element sublimely, and she positively nails her character's emotional vivification during a harrowing prison sequence that packs an unexpected wallop — that carries through to the haunting finale — as it keenly intertwines with the flashback narrative of a persecuted lesbian actress. Once you let prejudice restrict specific personal liberties, Vendetta topically asks, where do you stop?

Moore (From Hell) published his source material in the early 1980s as a response to Margaret Thatcher-era England, but the subtexts of V for Vendetta are pretty darn applicable and timely decades later. Whether debut director James McTeigue (second-unit crew on the Matrix flicks) intended the movie as a subversive statement on the current political climate, a boldly hypothetical harbinger of strifes yet to come, or absorbing escapism with daggers and disguises and explosions (oh my!) is for him to know and audiences to debate — but it is subversive, boldy hypothetical and absorbing, often in the same scene, with an increasingly ardent resonance that's hard to shake off. In other words, like, whoa. A-