Comic-book adaptation, or "graphic-novel" adaptation, about an avenging superhero hidden behind the stiff grin of a Guy Fawkes mask: a kind of Frankensteinian composite pieced together of Zorro (the black hat and cape, the revolutionary politics, the carving of his initial on his handiwork), Blade (the adeptness with cutlery, the customized arsenal thereof), the Phantom of the Opera (the disfigurement by fire, the romantic longing, the underground lair), among others. Batman, Darkman, whateverman. But it's his superhuman powers, much more than his plagiarisms, that make him into a bore: a martial-arts magician, an invincible one-man-army, a rebel without a care. The Australian actor Hugo Weaving is the sonorous voice, and presumably the body, behind the disguise. And Natalie Portman, with a faint and fugitive British accent, and a political-prisoner haircut that martyrs her in the image of a Tibetan monk, is the tomato of his eye. The setting is indeed England, at a time in the near future when America, undermined by an unspecified war (illustrative news clips from the Middle East), has been reduced to "the world's biggest leper colony." England isn't much better, your standard totalitarian dystopia by way of Orwell, hard on minorities and nonconformists, explicitly homosexuals of both sexes, one of whom harbors a clandestine copy of the Koran. (For aesthetic reasons only, like one of the Book People in Fahrenheit 451.) The television voice of the regime, meantime, is a Bill O'Reilly blowhard, and its official head (John Hurt, promoted from his spot as the downtrodden hero in the 1984 treatment of 1984) is a Hitlerian ranter and raver. The only thing the least bit out of the ordinary in all of this is the closeness of the correlation to the present day, the strictness of the equivalence, the bluntness of the political comment, the harness on the imagination. One might guess that the filmmakers -- first-time director and veteran ad man James McTeigue, screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski -- would stop short of equating terrorism and justice. But that can only be a guess. They, and their upright terrorist, to the inaudible cheers of Al Qaeda, do not stop short of blowing up Parliament. With Stephen Rea and Stephen Fry. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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