The Matrix Reloaded
(Reviewed April 30, 2003)

They should have called it "The Matrix Retarded." Man, what a disappointment.

Here is what this movie is like: Imagine that you're with a girl who is really hot. Unfortunately, she also is tripping--and thinks that the disjointed delusions she feels compelled to share at long length with you are Incredibly Profound. She keeps babbling on and on about a bunch of Great Truths and the Meaning Of It All and how she Knows Things. She's dead serious, too, never so much as cracking a smile while blabbing a bunch of utter nonsense that she thinks should impress your intellect. Meanwhile, all you want the silly bim to do is strip and show you her special effects

(Now, wasn't that a better analytical comparison than "this movie is `Attack of the Clones' meets `Tron?'" I thought so.)

If you end up waiting in a long line to see this movie, here is a tip. "Reloaded" opens with a pair of pretty decent action scenes that last about five minutes. As soon as they are over, feel free to go use the restroom. Don't worry, you'll have plenty of time. With a solid HOUR of boring "down in Zion with the Thunderdome crowd" stuff before anything interesting happens, you can do a very, very leisurely Number Two.

Honestly, I can't figure out what the writer/director Wachowski brothers were thinking. If there is a surer way to blow audience goodwill than by making fans of flashy, hi-tech, fast-'n'-furious violence sit through an hour of dull-and-dingey cave scenes, I can't imagine what it would be. You will sit stupefied with disbelief through a painfully long (and remarkably badly edited) "disco rave." You will wonder if George Lucas's even more clueless twin contributed the talky, molasses-slow chat that Neo has with one of Zion's governing-body councillors. (He seems to be on loan from the narcolepsy-inducing Star Wars senate.) You'll even be treated to one of those classically awful "leaders hashing out policy with military reps and a couple of hundred concerned citizens" scenes, the kind that make you wonder if the movie's creators think C-SPAN holds a weird fascination for jumped-up 12-year-olds.

I kept waiting for ga-ga-ga-gorgeous Monica Bellucci (who plays white-latex-clad Persephone) to show up and give me something to look at besides Zion's potato-sack-clad downtrodden. The problem with her scene is the same one that all of "Reloaded"'s good-looking parts are burdened by: They seem like vignettes intended as trailers for better movies. Nothing makes a lick of sense, the pieces don't mesh, and the characters are all cartoonishly phony...but hey, those bullet-time shots sure look cool (even if they appear just a few times too often here to be special anymore). There also is a lot of that goofy chop-socky wirework that's so silly and unbelievable it has become the modern-day equivalent of a guy in a Godzilla suit knocking over cardboard buildings.

I was trying to puzzle out why the "doesn't-make-sense" aspect of a movie like David Lynch's "Lost Highway" doesn't bother me, but bugs the hell out of me in the "Matrix" flicks. I think the reason comes down to the fact that the Lynch movie is like a weird, disturbing dream, while the "Matrix" movies seem more self-consciously stupid and full of themselves. Lynch's movie is like the haunted fantasy of a disturbed mind that has found its own creepy reality, while "Reloaded" is what the Krelboyne virgins in the Science Building would come up with after too many Red Bulls. (If you think I'm exaggerating with that "virgins" crack, just wait until you see the junior-high-school level "eroticism" of the scene in which Persephone asks to be kissed. You'll think you're watching an outtake from "Dawson's Creek.")

Here are a few of the most basic "doesn't-make-sense" things about "Matrix": If Neo can stop bullets in mid-air, why can't the same "force-field" power be used to keep karate chops or knives from touching his person? If the world of the Matrix is actually a computer program being run by evil machines, and if those machines know that Our Heroes are physically affected by what happens to them when they are "inside" the program, why doesn't Agent Smith simply detonate a large nuclear weapon there--instead of merely punching Neo a lot and playing "pile-on?" Finally, why can't Zion's hackers simply break into the Matrix program using keystrokes on a keyboard from the komfort of their kouches, if the whole thing is really only a bunch of ones and zeros on a big server somewhere?

Okay, so if it's a given that this movie is preposterous when it's not ponderous, how come I'm giving it a relatively generous "C-" grade? Because bits and pieces of it look just swell. There's a great car chase, some cool shoot-outs (even if the bad guys still suffer from "can't hit the broad side of a barn" syndrome), and a few way-too-short scenes of those mechanical squids whipping around with bad intent. Don't get me wrong, there are nowhere near as many action scenes as you will be expecting. But on the scattered occasions when characters stop spouting Zen-for-Dummies dialog and get down to business in the movie's second hour, things look pretty good.

I have a very, very bad feeling that there is only one way this series can end, if it is going to "cover all bases" and make sense out of all the contradictions and chaos. At this point, it really looks as if the only way the third movie can wrap things up is by saying that everything in both worlds--Matrix and Zion--is a computer program, and that nobody we have seen in either reality is real. Either that, or everything will turn out to be happening in the head of a Jerry Cornelius ripoff. (Go read Michael Moorcock's "The Condition of Muzak" if you don't get the reference. Or, if you're post-literate, think back to the finale of "St. Elsewhere," in which everything in the entire series was revealed to have happened in the mind of an autistic child holding a snow-globe.)

We'll see in November!

Back Row Grade: C-

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