Excellent follow up.. With a little cheese..

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 2003)

I don't get why this movie got so much criticism. It is a very good sequel to the first part.
Granted, a lot of the coolness of the first movie is no longer as surprising or cool, but still the movie is very solid in every aspect.
The movie follows a solid story, and if anyone actually focused on the dialogs between Neo and the Oracle and the "Architect" they would find the story is solid and heading in a very pleasant direction. The plot is strong and the scripting is wonderful. It goes without saying that the action scenes are superb, though after a while you begin to get that feeling of watching the Terminator movies.. All the scenes until the last one are not going to surprize you because you already know that neither the bad guy nor the good guy are going to die.
The movie does have two drawbacks.. The first is Keanu Reeves.. The man just should not act. But he is a penalty that all three movies will endure. The one thing that this series has going for it is that the main character has to look cool and carry a stern face around most of the time, something Reeves does with excellence. His love scene with Carrie-Ann Moss is nothing short of dreadful, she might as well have been having sex with her laptop. There is no chemistry between Reeves and Moss, and it is not Moss' fault, there is no chemsitry between Reeves and anything in that movie, except his sunglasses.
The other drawback is the cheese.. The people who are "outside the matrix" who are living in the real world, wear weird robes and dance to African drums in the "temple" and have wild collective parties and are basically copied from a mixture of sci-fi/fantasy sources. There is no denying that those people are refugees who should be having it tough, but the image that the writers and directors created.. It just makes you want to take the blue pill and go live back in the computer generated fantasy.