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.