V For Vendetta *1/2 out of ****

MBPLN for ... Murky, Boring, Pompous, Liberal Nonsense

The most creative moments of “V for Vendetta” are during its flashy end credits, bathed in red, played over The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.”

No kidding.

The movie is a tremendous artistic letdown. Drab. Pompous. Obvious. So liberal it cannot possibly be considered a sincere allegory, but rather a preach-to-the-choir rant that Michael Moore would appreciate. At least Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” had the juice to stick it to the Bush administration - “V” merely wishes it so - and did not cloak its intentions behind an advertising campaign that features star Natalie Portman - who until now was Hollywood’s staunchest defender of Israel, the closet thing we’ve got to a police-state democracy - in roundtables discussing the nature of terrorism.

The Wachowski Brothers chose to adapt Alan Moore’s graphic novel as their encore to “The Matrix” trilogy, inserting the second unit director from those films, James McTigue, as director here. Set 20 years in the future, England has fallen into tyranny, with Hitleresque High Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt) helming a government that enforces curfews, shapes the news to fit its agenda and employs “fingermen” to execute its ultra-conservative rulebook. It’s these men that harass Evey Hammond (Portman) in a London back alley one night with the intent of raping her when a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask disarms them, rescues the girl
and sweeps her to the rooftop so she can watch him bomb Old Bailey.

The man is V (Hugo Weaving), a survivor of government experiments hot for payback and revolution, using the mask of Fawkes - who tried to blow up British Parliament in 1605 - to cover his disfigured face. Theatrical, talky, tortured, brilliant, V is a political Phantom, and London is his Opera House. And shy, observant Evey is the girl he’ll come to love. The morning after Old Bailey comes down, V hijacks the state-run TV network and announces he will, in one year, finish what Fawkes started. He invites all of England to come and see.

Evey is linked to V, and has no choice but to hide out with him, at least until she can escape. She succeeds, but eventually lands in state prison, where she is tortured to divulge V’s whereabouts. If, in fact, she really is in state prison.

“V For Vendetta” is not without its clever twists. Or sincere performances - Portman is especially invested and effective, and Stephen Rea, as a police inspector charged with finding V, pads his resume of taciturn, shambled cops. The weaknesses are McTigue’s boring direction and the Wachowski Brothers’ script in its lack of continuity and tone - the background touches that make movies like “Blade Runner,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “Minority Report” challenging meditations on the future.

We never get a handle on the government, omnipresent in some scenes, absent in others. Considering his past, it’s unlikely V would have the access to the unlimited quantities cash needed to execute his Parliament plan, which is straight out of “Shawshank Redemption” anyhow. And one can buy only so many moments when a key face looms just out of the spotlight or the second most-wanted terrorist in England can walk around easy breezy because she has a shaved head and a fake ID.

The Wachowskis are also too occupied with their liberal markers and props to create an effective argument. V has leather-bound books, art and movie posters in his cave. That means he’s wise. A friend of Evey’s hides a Koran preserved in glass. That means he’s tolerant. The government’s symbol is a weird variation on the Christian cross. That means Christianity is twisted.

Then there’s the Wachowski’s agenda of sexual freedom - buried in the subtext of “The Matrix” series, but front and center in “V For Vendetta” (and previously “Bound”). A government can violate a thousand rights, and yet the movie chooses as its two testimonials a gay man and a lesbian robbed of their desires. Since the picture never exactly articulates the government’s other targets, yet we’re certain they exist, we’re left with sense that “V For Vendetta” places gay rights at the top of its freedom hierarchy, and that tyranny strikes first at gays, and society through them, similar to the Nazis persecution of the Jews.

A scarier, tougher movie goes right at the heart of V’s thesis statement - “government should fear its people” - and examines it through a activist with whom it’s not so convenient for the literati to side. Consider America’s own twisted V - not the 9/11 terrorists, but Timothy McVeigh, the conservative wing nut who blew up a federal building in response to the FBI’s raid on Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Raised on a rich diet of reciprocity, militarism and hatred, McVeigh nevertheless had an intriguing point to make about the violations of our Second Amendment gun rights. He was a modern Guy Fawkes, he spoke of collateral damage and revolution, and when it came time to line up behind him, we instead put his execution on close-circuit television so the victim’s families could watch him die.

Just in case you forgot “V For Vendetta” was a fantasy.

The Pink Panther 1/2* out of ****

Stinky Pinky

Because of his involvement in the “Cheaper By The Dozen” series, Steve Martin’s remake of “The Pink Panther” has been pitched as a PG family film with two simulated sex scenes, Viagra, a couple murders and Beyonce Knowles exposing a sheer lace bra in a recording session. Finger-wagging is lame, but then so are Martin and director Shawn Levy for pitching the movie to 12-year-olds. Who else is supposed to laugh when Inspector Clouseau needlessly knocks the bumpers off two cars as he parks his mini-mini Cooper?

Martin fails to fill just one of Peter Sellers’ shoes as Clouseau, handicapping his performance with a doubly thick French accent and overdone physicality. The bumbling detective is called upon to be, unbeknownst to him, a Trojan horse by Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Kevin Kline, DOA) in the murder investigation of the national soccer coach. Clouseau will draw the media attention and the scent while Dreyfus assembles a crack team to actually solve the case.

The killer’s identity doesn’t matter - Martin and co-writer Len Blum thought so little of the central plot that it’s obvious the coach’s murder would have been caught on tape anyway - and so we are left with 90 minutes of antics and aimless banter between Clouseau and his assistant (Jean Reno), Clouseau and his other assistant (Emily Mortimer) and Clouseau and Xania (Knowles), the coach’s pop-star girlfriend. Beyonce is a total blank, a groomed thoroughbred cast for her hair and cleavage; like Jessica Simpson, she doesn’t have a core personality outside the madonna/whore poses she strikes in her music videos. If you look real close, you’ll see her lips moving.

Kids could care less about any of these things. Most of them will laugh at the “hamburger” bit (which is nothing - nothing - more than a Saturday Night Live skit) and some of the dumber ones will pretend to laugh when Martin’s face is buried in Mortimer’s crotch. But then they’re kids, and know what? We don’t have to always judge movies - especially one with nobody in it younger than 24 - by whether kids will buy the DVD, watch it once, then package it sale with a Jessica Alba offering at the going-to-college garage sale .

Crash *** out of ****

Love it or hate it...here's your best picture

There are nine million stories in New York City. In Los Angeles, there's just one, and we're all a part of it.

The degrees of separation dwindle from six to two. Love, hate, crime, virtue, defeat, triumph - it's all part of the same soup in the desert under hazy skies. The best Los Angeles movies - "Chinatown," "LA Confidential," "Magnolia," "Short Cuts" - express that theme with large casts, a wide canvas, a feast of subplots and an operatic scheme.

"Crash" isn't quite cut from that cloth, but it belongs in the conversation, especially now that it's won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Writer-director Paul Haggis investigates racism under admittedly contrived, sensational circumstances, where villains become heroes and vice versa in one day. But the writing is strong and fierce, and the conflicts, while hyperboles, underline what's really going on out there - we're all pretty ticked off, nursing certain wounds, equally capable of cruelty and sympathy depending on who or what irritates that ulcer of discontent. Consider the characters long enough, and a more classic theme emerges - good vs evil, sin vs charity. Haggis is smart enough to know racism is a symptom, not the disease. Over two hours he slowly proves it.

The large ensemble includes Don Cheadle as a homicide detective, an unfavored son to his heroin-addicted mother; Matt Dillon as a racist cop watching his father die because of a crooked HMO; Ryan Phillippe as his partner; Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton as an upscale black couple targeted by Dillon's character one late night; Brendan Fraser as a too-race-conscious district attorney; Sandra Bullock as his trophy wife; Larenz Tate and Ludacris as carjackers ; and William Fichtner, in one of those deal-with-the-devil roles of sublime corruption in the name of sensible politics.

They mix, sometimes violently, curse and grapple, even redeem one another. The plot is cleverly spun, if a bit mythical, and worth discovering in the theater. Cheadle is the lead; though the cast is billed alphabetically, only Cheadle wanders through the entire picture. He's excellent again, cool, intellectual, at a distance from his family and his partner (Jennifer Esposito), who doubles as his lover. Not unlike other characters in "Crash," there is one thing particularly important to him, and his flaws keep him from quite protecting it. The same with Dillon's cop - he means well with his father, but his "white man's lament" so damages relations with the black HMO manager (Loretta Devine) that it nullfies his good intent. Newton and Bullock, in smaller roles, illuminate the necessity for marginalized wives to express the anger their prominent husbands cannot.

They're victims/villains, in a sense, able to articulate but not act, powerless in a structure that favors the male code of business. Nearly every major character, save one Latino locksmith(Michael Pena), seems to harbor some unjustified prejudice, and one of the weaknesses of "Crash" is that they speak of these in such blunt, vicious words. But it's also a strength: While racism in the 21st Century is subversive enough that we've developed ways of executing our prejudice without resorting to slurs, Haggis knows that, in a movie, a flashpoint must precede substance if it's going to reach a wide audience. A gotcha before the insight.

By the end Haggis has taken us through enough of these gotchas that we can telegraph the "surprise" twist, involving what was previously the movie's most upstanding, idealistic character. And I don't much buy that scene, sad and jarring as it is. But by that point you're wrapped up in "Crash," in its barking performances, Mark Isham's somber score and night setting, so that you reflect on a world whose misfortune, among others, is to fear what we don't know or understand, instead of embracing what we can.

"I wake up angry every morning," Bullock's character says at one point, and it's a summary statement for the whole tangled web. Directing it toward a skin tone or a foreign accent seems pretty dumb but, of course, when you're happy, waking up angry every morning does, too.