A pretentiously awful film, made worse by its appearance coincident with the Colorado school violence.

Rating: 2/10 (24 April 1999)

Potential high school assassins would find this pretentiously awful film appropriately dour, dream-like, violent, validating of paranoia, techno-babbly, and pseudo-scientifically senseless. Others with a broader and deeper history of films behind them should be pleased to miss "The Matrix" and never look back. Its brother team of directors deserve no reward for any technical gimmickry that might momentarily wow an asocial ticket-buyer, because their ignorance (read it "sense of what was hot last week") and disdain for the human component--for people as the best or worst of us really talk and think (or view and listen) damages even actors who know better, such as Lawrence Fishburn. His appearance, unlucky for him, signals the utter retreat of the film into a doleful pattern of "Captain Video" dialogue--yes, accidental historical accuracy in self-conscious, robotic enunciation of unintentionally scoff-inspiring paradoxical phrases--punctuated, de rigeur, by spasms of billowing orange explosion (for the eye) and nattering automatic weapons fire (for the ear).