If I told you now that towards the end of the film one of the characters, a thirty-something Londoner, says “This place gives me the collywobbles”, you’d probably be able to guess which way I’m going to go with this.

V for Vendetta (the comic) was originally created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd in 1981, three years into Thatcher’s first government, and told the tale of sociopathic anarchist ‘V’ fighting against a near-future English Fascist state. Moore’s intention was not to put forth his own political views, but to get readers thinking about the issue themselves — V is a merciless killer; is this right, given the circumstances, or is he mad? What do people think?

V for Vendetta (the film) sanitises the story somewhat; V is a sort of left-leaning Liberal with a grudge. There’s no ethical or moral dilemma presented here — V is the hero and the state controlled by one-dimensional Nazi figures. This film version, directed by first-time director James McTeigue and produced by the Wachowski brothers, is so far removed from that original comic book that Alan Moore has requested his name not just be removed from the film, but from the original comic itself.

Which smoked with bloody execution

What’s on offer here is a fairly limp affair. The story has been well-scrubbed and polished to make it suitably safe for cinema-going audiences. The moral and political messages are simplistic and heavy-handed, awkwardly updated, and there’s no ambiguity or intellectual challenge.

There’s very little sense of tension or drama; though we’re told (there’s a lot of exposition) that V’s terrorist exploits are stirring the people of London into action, we don’t really see that aside from some disgruntled, toothy locals in a pub who say ‘bollocks’ a lot, and a small child in a suburban household who also says ‘bollocks’ a lot (because that’s what English people say, you know). By repeatedly showing the same characters and their ‘bollocks’ reaction, any sense of scale is lost — when several hundred thousand people all show up at an appointed time and place during the climax of the film, it’s completely unreal.

The cast — Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, John Hurt — all shuffle their way through their parts with little passion or interest. Portman gets her Shawshank moment and Hurt gets to raise his voice a lot…it’s nothing you won’t have seen before in other films — at one point V even does the old ‘reveal the bullet-proof vest for the benefit of the audience’ gag. Same old, same old.