Wait for the DVD

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2003)

OK...so eventually you've got to see this, if only for the catty scenes with Monica Bellucci and Lambert Wilson. But it's got to be one of the biggest disappointments in years, right up there with The Phantom Menace. I send out about one movie recommendation a year to a large group of friends (the last was to recommend "Punch Drunk Love"); this is the first time I've been moved to actually warn people. This is only too fitting because the first film gave us all so much hope that maybe these Wachowskis (who made Bound, for god's sake) were something really new and different for big-time Hollywood: relatively young people who could take ideas derived from absolutely everything they saw while growing up and yet turn them into something unique and utterly cool. Which they did. Once.
It's really painful to watch a story so promising turn into bad Star Trek. It kills me how apologistic critics keep referring to the "humanity" of the film - trust me, any humanity it contains comes from a particularly bad episode of Deep Space Nine. Even the action sequences go on way too long and what's worse, do not contribute much of anything to the narrative. They are there because it's what everyone expects, not because they make any sense or have any relevance. I defy anyone to explain why the celebrated battle against 100 Agent Smiths is about: they can't kill him, he can't kill them, so it just ends. Huh? You can get that kind of brilliance in Tom & Jerry cartoons.
$175 million in people and tech can't make up for a $1.98 script. Rent as cheaply as possible.