focoproject.com

• Director: James McTeigue
• Genre: Crime/Drama/Thriller/Sci-fi
• Year: 2005

The first I hear of this movie was at the ComicCon last year, when we where shown previews of ‘The Fountain’ and the fourth installment of Harry Potter. However, I missed the actual trailer and only caught the interview with Natalie Portman. However, the idea intruiged me enough to want to see the film and worried me enough to think that it was going to fall on its face as most comic book movies often do.

The trailers did very little to ease my nerves, because one can make a crappy movie look good in a trailer if one knows what one is doing. It happens all the time, you watch a trailer for an action movie that looks like its going to be sweet only to find out they basically showed you all the good parts of the movie in the trailer and the remaining 95% of the content was pure crap.

Either way, just the fact that this had Natalie Portman in it gave me enough momentum. I would have seen this on its opening weekend if I had not been in Las Vegas at the time. Instead it had to be put off for a week, which gave me enough time to get a feel for what reviewers were saying. Normally I do not give much weight to reviews. I find that I need to determine the credibility of the reviewer before trusting his/her opinion. So oftentimes I resort to Metacritic or Rotten tomatoes, which give averages of a number of reviews rather than just focus on one. From what I could see, this movie was pretty well accepted.

In the end, however, it took me sitting down in front of that screen and watching this movie to really make up my mind (as it should be, I suppose). I liked it. I really did.

I should take a moment and clarify that I have never read the comic book and that I have no intention of doing so, therefore I am free to look at this movie on its own without comparing it to its original source. And as such, I felt this film did a great job with its characters, particularly when the lead is a man whose face you never see and whose sole emotions are carried from behind a mask that never changes its features. That is quite a task, and yet the film was not short of emotion.

Based in the near future, the story deals with a terrorist, fighting the government in order to bring power back to the masses where it should be. Though at the heart of his reason, is a very personal agenda. Caught in the slipstream, is Natalie Portman, who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up getting sucked into this anarchist’s vacuum.

Save for a couple of moments that were a bit “comicbookish” and in my opinion a bit cheesy, the movie as a whole played out well, giving enough fodder to think about the subject beyond the concept of a cool vigilante.

Rating: 4 out of 5
Notes: There is quite a bit of violence and brief nudity
Quote: V: A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.