Same Tricks, Overloaded
by Ed Owens

The Matrix Reloaded is, so far, the most surprising movie of the year. I went in with relatively low expectations, hoping for little more than an entertaining diversion with one or two "wow" moments, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would manage to so deftly blow and suck at the same time.

It seems the Wachowskis have been reading too much of their own press. Gone is the rib-poking, eye-winking playful referentiality of the first movie, replaced instead by a combination of heavy-handed moralizing and empty-headed techno-babble. What little life the characters might have had has been sucked dry, leaving nothing more than soulless shells, albeit ones who can leap speeding 18-wheelers in a single bound. The screen literally drips pretension for its entire overlong 138 minute running time, with even individual scenes being so caught up in their own self-conceived brilliance that they don't know when to end (for example, the film's opening scene, involving a high-rise freefall firefight between Trinity and a pursuing agent, shows us the two passing by a seemingly endless variety of camera angles and positions, leaving us with two distinct impressions--that this is indeed a very tall building, and that the two divers are very poor marksmen...or marksman and markswoman for the more politically correct).

Keanu Reeves emotes even less here than he did in the first film, with his sole instruction apparently being to act uber-cool, while Laurence Fishburne is given the sort of dialogue that even Sir John Gielgud at his most whorish would have turned down (it certainly doesn't help that Fishburne appears as if the only spinning backflips he's done in the interim have been in the checkout line at McDonald's). If any of the actors succeed, it is Carrie-Anne Moss, who manages to move me to wondering just what it was I found so attractive about her in the first place. Numerous new characters are introduced, but none of them are given much of value to do. Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) shows up only when most convenient, and suffers the added indignity of being saddled with the most gratuitous love triangle this side of Luke, Laura, and Scorpio, while " Jar-Jar" Link (Harold Perrineau) mostly serves to provide comic relief and respond to the audience's inevitable questions of "Wha?!?" with either "That's strange..." or "I've never seen that before..."

Even the action scenes manage to bore, providing less excitement than a spilled ginger ale in the Owens house. The problem is that the Wachowskis seem so hellbent on pushing the envelope that the end result comes off as either absurdly silly or looks worse than the cardboard sets of Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (one scene, a seemingly interminable playground smackdown between Neo and dozens of Mr. Smiths, manages to do both at the same time). I should say that all is not rotten in Denmark--a pair of dreadlocked albino twin telemorphs manage to bring some zip to the proceedings (though with effects far less nifty than those of X2) and the motorcycle portion of the soon-to-be-infamous freeway chase manages to generate some genuine anxiety, albeit only on the level of pure visceral thrill.

Unfortunately, Matrix Revolutions is, even as we speak, pretty much in the can, leaving little reason to offer any advice to the Wachowskis on where to go from here. As it stands, The Matrix Reloaded takes its lesson from none other than George Lucas, giving us a sequel that buckles under the weight of its own sense of self-importance, and making us wish we had chosen the blue pill instead.

©2003 Ed Owens
CineScene