Please can the Wachowski Brothers from now on be banned from writing their own scripts?

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2003)

I had high hopes when Link said of Neo's flying, "He's doing his Superman thing", and we cut to Neo flying so much like Superman it looked like a deliberate parody. But, sad to say, that was the last drop of humour in an all-too-humourless film which takes itself far too seriously.
Whatever happened to the days when the action blockbuster was fun? Sure the action sequences are absolutely phenomenal (the freeway sequence was a masterpiece of continuity - that sequence should win Reloaded the Best Editing Oscar by itself), but we, the audience, have to work so hard during the rest of the movie.
No-one designs action sequences better than the Wachowski brothers, but they really have no idea about good story structure or believable characterisation. I thought Morpheus's speech and the love scene between Neo and Trinity should have been the precursor to a major climax near the end of the movie, not just stuck in for no apparent reason at the half hour point. The rave was just a sweaty waste of time. There was supposed to be some kind of love-rivalry thing going on between Morpheus, Niobe and that other captain? But it seemed to be forgotten.
At the UK premiere, the cast were publicly annoyed with the critical roasting the movie has received from the media. One can't blame the cast for biting back a little; they absolutely worked their butts off seven days a week for an entire year, doing high intensity kung fu and other stunts. But all that hard work for amounts to, at best 40 minutes of a two and a quarter hour film. The parts that attracted the most criticism, i.e. all the talking, was probably shot in three weeks flat, but it takes up nearly three quarters of the movie.
I said that nobody designed better action sequences, but the Wachowski brothers lack imagination in the actual filming of those sequences. Without Bullet Time even the kung fu scenes would be boring. There is no artistry in the camera-work, as there is in the fight sequences of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, (or any number of John Woo films) for example. You sit watching Keanu Reeves hitting large numbers of people in unvarying and unimaginative side-on mid-shots. Bullet Time, when used, gives it the requisite "wow" factor, but why do we get no closeups of hands, feet or faces? You hardly feel anyone is really being hit at all, particularly with the apparently small repertoire of sounds used.
Fair play to the cast who did their best with poor material. It's not that the dialogue is especially clichéd, it's that the Wachowskis pick all the wrong words to express what they wanted to be said. When Twin #1 merges back into his brother's car and says, "We are getting aggravated", this is just acceptable. Then Twin #2 says "Yes we are" and you just cringe. "Is this good for us or bad for us?" says Trinity. Neo says that every floor is wired with explosives and she looks to the front and says, "Bad for us." Then the whole confrontation with the Merovingian is like that as well, and one gives up. It becomes too painful to watch.
They really, really needed a star to play The Architect. Someone of the stature of Morgan Freeman, Sean Connery or Gene Hackman. No-one else could sell a scene like that, and Herman Bakaitis certainly didn't.
One thing can be said to The Matrix Reloaded's credit. Although this movie franchise has proved to be very successful, the makers actually aren't in it for the money. However much the sum of its parts fail to add up to a watchable whole, the sequels are not rip-offs. The producers are serious about the film and what it represents. They just haven't got the knack of making it meaningful to a thinking audience. Another redeeming feature of the series from this point on, is a refreshing absence of the amorality that characterised one or two scenes in the first movie - this time there is no wholescale massacre of innocent people perpertrated by the supposed "good guys".
The saving grace of the whole series is the superb quality of the technical achievement. In The Matrix Reloaded, the freeway sequence in particular, constitutes the greatest piece of what I shall call "cinematic engineering", since the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959).