So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. 'I actually don't think it's right to kill people. Alan Moore again, in an excellent interview with Mile High comics: (Why change Susan to Sutler, for instance? Is it supposed to be a blend of Susan and Hitler?) Some do serious injustice to the book's complexity and deliberate ambiguity. Some of the changes are cosmetic and forgivable, if pointless. I can understand why Alan Moore might have disliked it so much. Yet as far as interpreting V for Vendetta goes, that absurd scene is the least of the film's crimes. That's to say, it isn't in the least bit funny. The best that can be said for the aforementioned Benny Hill moment is that it is true to its inspiration.

But he fails to quote the only appropriate lines: the ones about it being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' On the higher end of the cultural scale, V declaims Shakespeare, and in honour of Guy Fawkes's subversion in the age of James I, reels off lots of Macbeth. Like tourists with a phrasebook, the Wachowskis get people to say 'bollocks' a fair bit, and there is a pastiche of The Benny Hill Show. 'V For Vendetta is such an odd mixture: partly naive post-punk posturing, betraying the original's 1981 origins, and partly well-meant (but very American) condescension towards London and Britain. His review is so much fun, it's worth quoting more: It's safe to say that Bradshaw didn't enjoy it very much. Watching it is like having the oxygen supply to your brain slowly starved over more than two hours.' This film manages to be, at all times, weird and bizarre and baffling, but in a completely boring way. Yet another graphic novel has been bulldozed on to the screen, strutting its stuff for an assumed army of uncritical geeks – a fanbase product from which the fanbase has been amputated. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw agreed with that latter point: 'I've read the screenplay,' Mr Moore said. 'To him, the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta is not the biggest platform yet for his ideas: it is further proof that Hollywood should be avoided at all costs.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore