A triumph of facades and pressure-marketing over substance

Rating: 2/10 (21 May 2003)

I've been on holidays with my family up in Queensland for a while, and when I get bored enough, I just have to go and see films. It was two for $10 night at the local theatre, and since I had seen everything I actually wanted to see, my father insisted that we go and see what I like to call The Mushtrix Rehashed. We might as well have flushed that $10 down the nearest toilet, for a number of reasons.
I tried to go in with an open mind. No, really, I did - what else can you do when you want to be entertained? I said to myself that I would respect this sequel if it managed to justify its own existence in terms of storytelling. Well, guess what? I didn't even accomplish that much. Talk about going in with low expectations and not even having them fulfilled.
I think the most telling moment, however, was when the fight sequences only used slow motion for a handful of seconds and yet we still got bored with them. During the moment when Neo first fights Smith, I turned to my dad and asked him if I was supposed to do something with a control pad. A later comment that he made was that just about every sequence in the film went on past its welcome. Which reminds me, was the pathetic camera-work meant to hide the fact that the writers still haven't gotten past plaigirising Once Upon A Time In China?
I think that summed up most of the film, in fact. Not only that, but how are you meant to give a stuff about characters and whether they win fights or not when the rules of victory are never defined? You could put these agents in blocks of concrete and drop them into the ocean, but they'd still say "ha! I'll have this body now!". It is childish and insulting to the intelligence. Not even Star Trek overuses Plot Crowbars such as Deus Ex Machina this much. Now that Star Trek: Nemesis has killed the Trek franchise, will we be remembering telephones in twenty years time as the ultimate Deus Ex Machina? Or Neo?
Whatever you do, don't get me started on the sequences within Zion. I just hope that Plato is spinning in his grave hard enough to add a slight eccentricity to this planet's orbit. I'm also willing to bet messers Wachowski were also a little too receptive to certain scenes with Christopher Lee during The Two Towers. And I will say this only once - you know a film is in trouble when key action sequences remind one of The Fast And The Furious. Have these guys ever had an original idea?
I also find it quite painful when people praise this cinematic abortion as a masterwork while pointing out The Phantom Menace's or Attack Of The Clods' wretched dialogue at every opportunity. The only writer who compares to Lucas or Whackoffski's obvious lack of knowledge about how human beings really speak or form linguistic traits is Shakespeare. I remember having an incredible urge to get out of my seat and scream "speak naturally!" at half the cast. But then, what can you expect when the lead hero plays his roles all the same way - like a coffee table?
On a slightly more positive note, at least they kept the masturbatory contemporary music out until the end credits. Unfortunately, the number they do choose is so utterly pathetic that it makes me shed a tear for the fact that a film that is supposed to somehow praise the beauty of individualistic thought only serves to remind me how much we've all lost an important aspect of our freedom. This boring load of over-hyped, overrated rubbish honestly couldn't have been more upsetting if the theatre was required to seatbelts in their chairs. Since the IMDb rating system does not allow a score of zero, I gave The Matrix Rehashed a two out of ten. It is not even bad enough to be entertaining. It is just plain tried.