I won’t publish my review of V for Vendetta until opening day. But I will say that I managed to make it until the closing credits without walking way in boredom and disgust… but just barely.

I will, however, link to one of those pages where the reviewer (David Denby of The New Yorker) is apparently somehow exempt from the industry standards. And I find myself agreeing with him.

…even if one enjoys the craft of “Vendetta,” and, viewing it as an extravagant pop myth, cuts it as much slack as possible, there’s no getting around the fact that this allegedly antifascist work lusts after fire and death.

The country “doesn’t need a building,” V says. “It needs an idea.” Yes, but “Vendetta” doesn’t have any ideas, except for a misbegotten belief in cleansing acts of violence. How strangely doth pop make its murderous way, as V might say. The quarter-century-old disgruntled fantasies of two English comic-book artists, amplified by a powerful movie company, and ambushed by history, wind up yielding a disastrous muddle.

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