In a way, this scene epitomizes my response to V for Vendetta as a whole. It’s a stylized, often visually-striking film which pays homage to its graphic-novel roots by using a pared-down color scheme and paying careful attention to line and blocking. But the film’s compelling visuals often jar with its grueling subject matter. One case in point is the time the character Evey spends in prison, shown largely through montage. She is filmed from above as she curls on the floor in her orange jumpsuit in a variety of different positions, one frame slowly fading into another to mark the long passage of her days. The effect is disturbing: Evey at once appears as a person who is suffering and as an aestheticized spectacle, a smear of orange across the dark canvas of her cell.

There are several such moments in V for Vendetta, and the film does attempt, here and there, to integrate them into its major themes. V’s theatrical means of terrorism, such as blowing up Parliament as a “symbol” of the revolution, and leaving red roses on the bodies of his victims, can be seen as analogous to what the filmmakers are doing. Both use violence, but with style and flair. If V were just a Rambo-type thug spraying bullets everywhere, or the Wachowski brothers were content to just shoot the gritty side of Evey’s prison term, the film would be a grisly mess. Add art to the mix, and suddenly it’s compelling.

If I were confident that the filmmakers knew what they were doing, if I could say with surety that they intended this uncomfortable tension between the aesthetic and the violent as part of the film’s message, I’d be okay with it. But I’m not convinced that the Wachowski brothers and director James McTeigue are in control of their material. The film appears too uneven for that. The comic-book silliness of V’s mask and wig, the misplaced attempts at humor, and the Hollywood-style pandering to the audience (such as an unnecessary romance between Evey and V) don’t seem to belong in the same moral universe with some of its more wrenching scenes, such as a shot of bodies dumped in a mass grave, or a sequence set in a monument to children killed by biological weapons. The film doesn’t know whether it wants to be a superhero blockbuster or a message picture, and attempts, disastrously, to have it both ways.

Furthermore, the filmmakers lack the courage of their convictions. Rather than opt for an ambiguous ending which leaves the film’s more questions unresolved, they cop out, going with a showstopper finale set to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. V is a hero, they attempt to convince us; Evey did the right thing by pulling that lever; the masses have spoken, and England will be free once more. None of this is convincing, but the filmmakers seem to want it to be, and that’s scary.

V for Vendetta makes strenuous emotional demands on the viewer, and doesn’t deliver. It asks that the audience witness kidnappings; murders; a woman being threatened with rape, kept under house arrest, and then tortured and imprisoned; a bishop pawing a “call girl” dressed as an underage Lolita; viruses being tested on innocent people—on children—without their knowledge, piles of bodies that recall the Holocaust: all this without knowing where it’s going or what it wants to say. Such images should not be cheapened by being put to the service of what is basically a thriller with pretensions. That isn’t just bad art; it’s moral irresponsibility.