What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that this film includes recurring and explicit violence, including explosions, martial arts fights, knifings (with bloody results quite visible), shootings, and torture inside prison cells (where one character shares her space with a rat). The film opens with a flashback to a 1605 hanging, and then, in the present, an imminent rape (stopped by V's violent intervention). The film includes scenes of war and police state tactics, including the brutal incarceration of race and sexual minorities in Britain. A young girl sees her mother kidnapped by government flunkies, then witnesses a similar brutality as an adult. When a bishop arranges for sex with an underage girl (apparently a regular practice), he's killed as punishment (but not before he pushes his would-be girl victim onto his bed). Characters curse occasionally (infrequent use of the f-word, plus "bloody hell," "bitch," and the s-word).
- Families can talk about the film's presentation of terrorism as reasonable response to state oppression. Is violence ever an appropriate response? How do the evil chancellor's raging and V's tragic background (abused and institutionalized as a child) make V's cause seem sympathetic, even if it's illegal and aggressive? How does Evey's own childhood loss of her parents make her ready to be V's protégé? For fans of the book, families can discuss the differences between the film and its inspiration.