Ho Hum

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2006)

While the Wachowski Brothers's The Matrix is one of my favorite movies, the sequels were not as inspiring. I watched them two years ago, and recently re-viewed them to ascertain why they were not as "whoa"-inducing as the first. (Since the sequels are one movie split in two, I'll treat them as one movie here.)
To recap: The original ended with Neo (Keanu Reeves) becoming the Kong-fu-master- messiah of the Matrix, a virtual reality network used by robots to imprison and harvest energy from post-apocalyptic humanity. Neo can stop bullets and kill Agents, the Matrix's super powered policemen.
The sequels begin with real-world robots tunneling toward the last human city, Zion. Morpheus, Neo's mentor, sends him into the Matrix to consult the Oracle. She, in turn, tells him to seek the "Source." Meanwhile, Neo and friends run into Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), whom Neo deleted in the last movie but has since found his way out of the recycling bin and become a self-replicating virus.
These and subsequent plot points punctuate four hours of vapid, pretentious dialog and gratuitous, prolonged action scenes (some entertaining, some confusing). All of which would have been more impressive if I had actually given a damn about anybody involved.
I had no reason to care about Neo: he has no idiosyncrasies, shows zero emotion--even while fighting--and more or less tells all his admirers in Zion to buzz off. The one thing that makes him a sympathetic character is his love for Trinity, which we know about only because he keeps mentioning it and because, whenever given an extra five seconds, they try to get horizontal (and they can't even do that very well: Shrek kisses more convincingly).