The totalitarian saga V for Vendetta scores well enough in its first hour as it works its way through the alphabet, earning a D for daring and an E for erudite compared to most action-oriented spectacles.

But the movie loses focus midway through, the tone shifting from silly but smart to just silly, with the movie meriting a P for pretension as it tries to comment on current world affairs and a T for tediousness as it drags on far longer than the story deserves.

Andy and Larry Wachowski, creators of The Matrix movies, wrote the screenplay based on David Lloyd's 1980s graphic novel, and the result feels like an extension or philosophical cousin of the siblings' sci-fi trilogy.

V for Vendetta lands somewhere between the neo-noir freshness of the original The Matrix and the indecipherable bombast of the two sequels.

First-time director James McTeigue, a Wachowski brothers protege as assistant director on The Matrix movies, effectively creates an image of Britain under the government's boot heel, blending the sombreness of George Orwell's 1984 with the flair of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Natalie Portman makes for a strong-willed heroine casting off complacency to rebel against a repressive regime, though she's generally upstage by Matrix co-star Hugo Weaving as the title character of V for Vendetta, even though he spends the entire movie concealed behind a Guy Fawkes mask.

For those unfamiliar with Fawkes, the movie opens with a quick history lesson, retelling his failed attempt to blow up London's Parliament in 1605 in protest against the government. Fawkes was caught and hanged, though he became something of a folk hero for centuries of citizens with gripes against the establishment.

V for Vendetta is set in a near future where xenophobic reactionaries have seized control of Britain to stomp out homosexuals, Muslims, the diseased and other "undesirables." Individual rights and personal freedom are sacrificed for severe law and order, and people are subject to the whims of a vicious secret police that can haul them off to "reclamation" facilities on a whim.

Evey (Portman), a gofer for the state-censored television service, is saved from ravagement at the hands of the police by V, who from behind his Fawkes mask and black cape flamboyantly spouts Shakespeare and carries out a one-man campaign of terrorism against the government.

Beginning with an explosive display on Nov. 5, the anniversary of Fawkes' foiled Gunpowder Plot, Evey is drawn over the following year into V's plans to make the ultimate statement against the government and impel the populace to rise up in revolution.

With overt references to The Count of Monte Cristo, the filmmakers lay out personal histories for Evey and her mentor, raising questions as to whether V is driven by a quest for justice or a thirst for revenge.

Weaving, best-known as the unctuous Agent Smith in The Matrix movies, is a gleeful dynamo, infusing V with mad passion and a real sense of tenderness, no easy task from behind a crazy mask.

Portman is at the centre of some disturbing sequences whose images recall the Holocaust. Able support is provided by Stephen Rea as the deadpan, industrious cop tracking V and Stephen Fry as a showy TV personality who's a friend to Evey.

With fine irony, John Hurt - who played the tragic romantic hero in a version of Orwell's 1984 - here is the equivalent of Big Brother, the high chancellor bent on maintaining power through any means necessary.

Lloyd's graphic novel was a response to the conservatism of Margaret Thatcher, while the movie makes a rather muddled attempt to extrapolate from today's state of affairs how a totalitarian society might evolve.

The filmmakers toss in sketchy references to the "former United States," now a plague-ridden land, and incorporate hints that global chaos from an American war created the circumstances through which hate-mongers rose to power in Britain.

But the action grows farcically heavy-handed at times, undermining whatever pretence V for Vendetta had to examine serious matters of individuality versus security of the state.

Still, the movie strikes an uneasy nerve. This is a story where you're clearly rooting for the terrorist, and the closing images are both horrific in a post-Sept. 11 world - and perversely exhilarating.

Two and a half stars out of four.