Flash

Rating: Null/10 (4 April 1999)

The rebel heroes (Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss) dodge the bad guys' bullets in an office-lobby firestorm shot with the extreme telephoto lenses and druggy, sexual slow motion of the final cataclysm in ZABRISKIE POINT. (Also terribly Antonioni-ish: a slow-motion shot of a helicopter pounding a skyscraper with artillery, the dead shells tinkling to earth like collapsed wind chimes.) Scored to trance music, with the camera gliding in and around slow-motion worlds, these scenes have a peculiarly nineties artificiality--Die Hard at a Rave.
But it's hard to imagine how the producer, Joel Silver (not one known for his dabbling in experiment), saw the allure of these opium-like sequences in the Wachowski Brothers' script, which contains the silliest cyber-metaphysics in contemporary movies. Poor Lawrence Fishburne--not a light touch in the best of times--is saddled with what must be the largest quantity of absurd exposition outside of an Ed Wood movie. (There are twenty minutes of the movie that feel like Lawrence Fishburne doing an industrial for Canon Copiers.) And the premise of the movie--that human beings must be rescued from this "false" world we live in, toward the "real," post-apocalyptic world--doesn't make a lick of sense. (The bad guy, Joe Pantaliano, is shown to be bad because he wants to eat steak and drink wine rather than mush in a toxic desert.)
The Wachowskis previously directed the unpleasantly leery lesbian-noir BOUND; what their actual personalities might be is impossible to say, as the leap from that movie to this is analogous to following up RED ROCK WEST with TRUE LIES. There are no performances to speak of in the movie, though it probably should be said that Keanu Reeves, within the postage-stamp range of this movie, seems perfectly in his element.