Not terrible, but terribly disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (25 May 2003)

I would find it hard to imagine that anyone who has seen the first Matrix movie and subsequently saw the second 'Reloaded' movie could have been anything but disappointed. This sequel is not terrible, but it is definitely weak. The first hour of the movie is simply boring. The kind of boring where you sit in the theater glancing at your watch every 15 minutes and realise you are enduring the movie rather than enjoying it. (I noted three other 'movie goers' walking out of the theater during this time.) When the action does begin, the 'fight' scenes are reminiscent of any 'Kung-Fu' movie you have seen and are often ridiculously long.
The "$300,000,000" budget was obviously poured into adding as much CG into as many scenes as possible, and although some aspects of the CG were very impressive...most were so exaggerated that people in the theater actually laughed and from then on the movie felt more like a 'comic book' style movie with Neo as the 'Superman' character. There were a few good additions to the background story and workings of the matrix as an entity, but apart from those I though the story was dull without any exciting revelations. The characters were developed even less and there was no feeling of empathy. This wasn't helped by poor dialogue and/or pathetic love scenes between several key characters. All in all, there were actually a couple of scenes and effects that were fantasic, but overall the movie was no where near the quality of the original 'Matrix' and I will not be bothering to see the next movie in the series. 3/10