A nice concept is dragged down by sorry acting and subpar fight scenes. (Spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2003)

[Note that this review contains spoilers. Also note that since there's really no plot to spoil, that doesn't matter.]
The first Matrix left me contemplating the meaning of life for a year to come. Matrix: Reloaded made me punch myself in the head in vain attempts to forget it.

The Good: Weapon's fight scenes were extremely entertaining--particularly the scenes with the staves. As a martial arts expert, I can very much appreciate someone twirling a stick around at a hundred miles per hour and managing to knock out an army of Smiths single-handedly without breaking a sweat.
I was also pretty impressed with the Architect--the 'father' of the Matrix. Despite his exhaustive diction and cryptic sentence structure, I was able to catch most of what he said, and found it very well thought out. Also, unlike others, I didn't find the repetition of pre-destiny annoying. I didn't consider it so much repetition as I did a series of clues leading up to a central idea: all things can be predicted.
Think about it this way: With sufficient information, anything is possible; if you know how to fly, you'll be able to fly. It also seems reasonable that, after X centuries of harvesting countless humans and studying their innermost workings, computers would have plenty of information to make an almost perfect prediction concerning the actions a given human will take under predetermined circumstances.

The Bad: Everything else. I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but I'm afraid it's not. The special effects that were revolutionary in 1999 have become antiquities, the melodramatic overacting of every actor was almost enough to make me leave (sans Morpheous, who I think was the victim of a bad script, the Frenchmen, who was excellent, and the Oracle, who was by far the best actor in the movie.).
I was also extremely frustrated by the hand to hand fight scenes against the Smiths. It seems to me that a unified body of programs would be capable of fighting as some sort of structured unit instead of 'run at Neo one by one, get smacked, repeat as necessary'.
Yet another irksome flaw was the Twins--the albino ghost things. It seems to me that if the purpose of the Matrix is to keep the humans sedated, the worst way to fulfill that purpose is to send snarling apparitions flying down a crowded highway attacking semis.
Finally, I was annoyed by the lack of coherence in the plot. I understood the whole thing just fine, but the concept of innumerable unrelated clues (excepting the predestination theory and a few others) leading to absolutely no reasonable conclusion left me feeling that I had missed something. However, the lack of intrigue or sensibility in the clues didn't make me particularly care what I had missed.

I know it sounds grim, but go see it anyway. If I had the choice to make again, I'd still see it for the weapons and the Architect, if for nothing else. Just don't go expecting anything remotely comparable to part one. If you're looking for a good movie, and you enjoyed the first Matrix, I cannot recommend strongly enough the movie Fight Club. It's probably the best movie I've seen since A Clockwork Orange.