V for Vendetta: Critic Reviews

A poorly paced and spectacularly disjointed rehash of Orwellian themes. It has a high production value and looks great, but suffers from a lack of narrative exposition that leads to sizable holes in the plot.

V for Vendetta has a playful-demon vitality, but it's designed to let political adolescents of every age congratulate themselves. It's rage against the machine by the machine.

This future-shock story about a masked avenger at war with a totalitarian British regime sags when it should zip.

V for Vendetta is a piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil.

The movie's a handsome piece of work, dramatically powerful even when it backs into silliness.

Absorbing even in its incoherence, V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new.

[An] enjoyable -- if occasionally irresponsible -- comic-book thriller.

As manifestoes go, this one's a beauty: draped like a funeral, smart as a whip and full of black-hearted romantic monologues and dramatically slit necks.

V for Vendetta engages in lots of speechifying about the importance of ideas and the freedom to question them. Ironically, though, the movie doesn't really seem to have any ideas of its own.

Fear is just one of the powerful themes in the ka-pow, ka-boom pleasure that is V for Vendetta.

A welcome blast of pop subversion.

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.

V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, almost always has something going on that is actually interesting, inviting us to decode the character and plot and apply the message where we will.

Only here and there do you find the spark and kinetic zap delivered by the first Matrix picture.

The swashbuckling first hour is superior to the second, which bursts at the seams with backstory, but a rousing climax makes this the most potent piece of agitpop in years.

The movie is a lot of dark, Orwellian fun.

Gripping, intelligent and innovative.

V for Vendetta has something going for it that's rare in mainstream films: It has ideas. It has questions. And even when it pretends to have answers, it also raises questions about those answers.

V for Vendetta wants to be a thoughtful political allegory, a chaste love story and a high-powered thriller all at the same time. It winds up being a big snooze.

Although often visually striking and undercoated by a compelling sci-fi concept, graphic-novel adaptation V for Vendetta feels flat as a storyboard.

It becomes just another taste of every comic-book movie that isn't Sin City or A History of Violence. Vapid.

This is not the movie, and these are not the times, for sophisticated arguments.

Feels far too starched and clean to do its source material justice.

A visually sumptuous concoction that combines political allegory, bloody action, and a few stunning cinematic moments into a solid piece of entertainment.

Entertaining and solidly crafted.