Ultimate infantility

Rating: Null/10 (22 July 2000)

From sleeping in slime to eating bowls of it, this film is the ultimate infantile S & M "action movie" so far. The mental age of movies is shrinking every year. This one has regressed to playing with body products and fearing bugs will bore into one's navel. All of society seems an evil plot to the infantile ego, which wants only -- well, it doesn't know what it wants, so it fills its anxiety-ridden idleness with paranoid fantasies of persecution and megalomanic schemes of being a Messiah -- with holes all over him and GREAT sunglasses. This pathetically pathological film blames everything for its hero's seething frustration except the thing most responsible -- the mesmerizing commercials on TV which have made young Americans despise themselves and feel inferior to the heroes and models they watch while they slump ever-deeper into their couches. How can the sequel be even more immature? Only by having the Matrix satisfy even more infantile fears by having controlling tentacles thrust up into the unwary rebels up out of toilet water. Films like this are harmless, but the egocentric insecurities they cater to are a cultural tragedy.