Wearing producer and screenwriter hats, the Wachowski Brothers present the first significant studio movie of the year. They've relinquished the director's chair, but their fingerprints are all over V for Vendetta, which uses a graphic novel to ignite a timely if gaudy bonfire of civil liberties.

The line between accessibility and obviousness is crossed on quite a number of occasions. But no filmmaker was ever jailed for spelling things out, and V for Vendetta stimulates by providing an idealistically profound political message accented by beauty-and-beast romanticism. There are campy elements, yet none of the Matrix trilogy's cryptic obscurantism. Best of all, the eminently approachable film is not an orgy of violence or special effects. It seeks to edify and ennoble the masses.

Condemning its populism as pretentious diminishes the end result, a broad-based revolution against a totalitarian government, triggered by an aesthete willing to lose what he cherishes and led to question his own violent methods. Inspired by Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and with a fetching accomplice called Evey (Natalie Portman), the titular masked figure incites this overthrow in futuristic Britian. 

The enemy is fascism with a capital "F", though no less chilling for being painted in the broadest possible strokes.  There's nothing subtle about the way this police state operates or is depicted. It's a traditional dystopia. You've got your secret police using brutal military tactics, eavesdropping and censorship, propaganda disseminated through tightly controlled media, curfews and restricted personal movements, and "Articles of Allegiance" that each so-called citizen must sign. The regime uses fear of terrorism, secularism and biological disasters to hold sway. It's still Great Britain however -- they drink plenty of whiskey and Big Brother is an obscenely over-the-top Hitleresque Chancellor, played by John Hurt.  

V's motives are both pure and impure, with the impurities stemming from long-ago events at a prison facility. After he hijacks the airways to rally the people, a senior police inspector (Stephen Rea) pursues him. He takes Evey into his underground lair with its secret art collection, jukebox stocked with American popular songs, and plasma TV playing the Count of Monte Cristo starring Robert Donat. V for Vendetta may be humorless but its cheesiness -- especially the schmaltzy, unconsummated love between V and Evey -- works.

Is it harder to act behind a mask or opposite one? Both performers face the challenge heroically. Hugo Weaving gives a surprisingly multi-faceted performance using his voice. He cuts an equally chivalrous and menacing figure as the refined, knife-wielding vigilante. Natalie Portman shoulders her burden well and gets shorn in the process. Lacking the maturity and gravitas to carry a film like this, she's effective because she's asked to react more than instigate. Evey is a pawn, but a lovely one who wins V over with her looks, her fortitude and her moral compass.

The Wachowskis wisely focused on adapting David Lloyd's graphic novel and hired James McTeigue to direct. In his maiden effort, McTeigue stages the material with aplomb, especially during the streamlined climax when you expect the action to be drawn out. The Wachowskis are humanists and the message they successfully convey cuts across political boundaries. They believe in the power of the individual, of art, and of ideas. The key to V's plight is the ability to move beyond paralyzing illusions and masks. Often, they argue, that requires acts of violence.  

As Evey's closeted boss -- the host of a TV variety show -- Stephen Fry is behind one of the movie's most memorable sequences -- a spoof of the Chancellor that echoes both Benny Hill and A Clockwork Orange. Those two British pop culture touchstones are a good way to sum up V for Vendetta. Not especially original cinematically or thematically, it packs a punch nevertheless.

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated "R" for strong violence and some language.)