The Mad Man In The Mask

Is it possible for a major Hollywood studio to make a $50 million movie in which the hero is a terrorist? A terrorist who appears wearing the dynamite waistcoat of a suicide bomber, and who utters the line--from beneath a full-face wooden mask that he never takes off--"Blowing up a building can change the world"? A movie written and produced by the Wachowski brothers, the cyberauteurs who created The Matrix? Starring Natalie Portman, shaved as bald as Demi Moore in G.I. Jane?

These are not rhetorical questions. V for Vendetta, set for release March 17, is that movie, and it is the most bizarre Hollywood production you will see (or refuse to see) this year. It's the kind of film that makes you ask questions like, Who thought this was a good idea?

It definitely started with a good idea. The man who had it was Alan Moore, probably the greatest writer in the history of comic books. In 1982 Moore--who also wrote Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--began publishing an almost unbearably dark series of comic books set in a dismal, dystopic future Britain ruled by an oppressive Orwellian government. V for Vendetta starred, instead of a superhero, a bitter, brilliant, at least half-insane resistance fighter known only as V, whose face was permanently hidden behind a grinning mask that, if you're English, you recognize as the face of Guy Fawkes. (Who--again, if you're English--you know as the proto-terrorist who tried and failed to blow up Parliament in 1605.)

V had superhuman strength--he was the product of a monstrous government medical experiment--mad fighting skills and a cruel sense of humor, and he used them to manipulate the media, assassinate officials in creative ways, stab people with big shiny knives and blow up buildings. Early in the comics he rescued a woman named Evey from government thugs, and she became his sidekick; later on he tortured Evey, to "help" her see his point of view. V was a freedom fighter, no question, but Moore never let you forget that he was also a terrorist, and as such he was both hero and villain. That was the sick, sad genius of the comic book: the government had taken everything from V, even his goodness.

You can see why all this would have appealed to Larry and Andy Wachowski, the band of brothers behind the Matrix trilogy. In the same way those movies did, V for Vendetta melds big ideas about power and liberation with futuristic blowuppy thrills. "I've made a lot of stupid action films," says Joel Silver, a producer on V. "But when we made the Matrix, we saw that people wanted more than that." In the mid-1990s, back before Keanu knew kung fu, the Wachowskis wrote a screenplay of V for Vendetta. When Matrix mania finally subsided in 2003, they had the time to get the movie made. Just as important, they'd earned Warner Bros. $600 million in the U.S. at the box office, and that kind of money buys you the kind of good will you need to make a risky film. Instead of directing it themselves, they tapped James McTeigue, who worked under them on the Matrix trilogy. (The Wachowskis no longer talk to the press, and their personal lives are the subject of considerable speculation. Larry, the older of the two, is a transvestite in a relationship with a Los Angeles dominatrix.)