 Critics are asking a lot of questions about V for Vendetta, set in the near future when Britain is supposedly ruled by a dictator and is challenged by a swashbuckling masked man. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Is this movie a parable about 2006, a cautionary tale or a pure fantasy?" Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Is the man in the mask who wants to make Parliament go boom Osama bin Laden or Patrick Henry? Or just a Phantom of the Opera clone? (She adds: "Your guess is as good as mine, and I've seen the film.) Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Is blowing up buildings in the name of freedom a good thing? What would George Bush make of all this? Or George Washington?" Amy Biancolli in the Houston Chronicle: "Can a terrorist be a hero?" Joel Siegel on ABC's Good Morning America: "Tell me, film-makers, how does one man alone in a totalitarian state take over British television then all alone manufacture and ship 200,000 masks?" Despite all of these questions, the film receives decent reviews. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post suggests that the questions don't really require answers. "The fast-moving "V for Vendetta" subordinates its political lecture to an entertaining piece of pulp fiction," he writes. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News calls it an "enjoyable -- if occasionally irresponsible -- comic-book thriller." And Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution predicts that the movie will likely elicit "passionate debate on the Internet among people with user names like Lord Asriel, Killdozer, Rant Breath and DocPazuzu. It is also the sort of movie that appeals to the inner teenage nerd/romantic in all of us." |
