Pretentious and tiresome film features superb sfx

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 1999)

It is really a shame that the talented Wachowski brothers did not spend more time paring down the sprawling, unwieldy, and ultimately confusing and unsatisfying plot threads of The Matrix and settle in on one. Had they found a way to drop about thirty minutes of this overlong and oftentimes dull hodge-podge, the truly spectacular martial arts and digital effects would have seemed even more special. A cyber-flick owing an equal debt to Blade Runner and Lewis Carroll, The Matrix collapses under the weight of an idiotic and mind-numbing New Testament-like structure that finds surrogates for Christ, Judas, etc. Joe Pantoliano, so thoroughly excellent in the Wachowski's previous outing Bound, is helpless and hapless playing the underwritten Cypher, but Hugo Weaving easily gives the worst performance of his career as a strictly one-note, wooden bad guy in the grand tradition of one-note, wooden bad guys.