The Wachowskis Go Off Their Rocker

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2006)

In the summer of '99 the Wachowski Brothers' sci-fi thriller The Matrix was the cool, sleek, sexy antidote to the dopey dinosaurism of George Lucas' Phantom Menace. Now the Wachowskis themselves have become George Lucas. The Matrix Reloaded, the further adventures of Neo, Morpheus and Trinity, is the Wachowskis laying claim to Lucas' throne by abandoning the hip, funny flair they showed in the first Matrix in favor of quasi-mythic hot-air. The film is three action scenes surrounded by some of the most show-killing, ear-abusing dialogue passages in the history of movies. When did the Wachowskis come to the conclusion that what summer movie audiences wanted was cliff-notes Camus? Did they think that by repeating the word "causality" over and over they could trick us into seeing their mumbo-jumbo about fate vs. free-will as anything but Philosophy 101 jive? This is what happens when hacks start taking themselves seriously. We sit down expecting kung-fu fights, cyber-rebel attitudes, iconic images of Laurence Fishburne in a black raincoat and Carrie-Anne Moss in a cat-woman outfit, but what do we get instead? A bad French actor rambling on for hours like Sartre if Sartre had had the IQ of a toenail clipping.
This is too bad, because one wants to enjoy the movie. Keanu Reeves is an actor who, despite his inadequacies, has the kind of good-humored, dogged way about him that melts cynicism, except you'd never know it by his joyless, immobile performance here. In Reloaded his character, Neo, has advanced beyond Jedi-apprentice status to full-Jedi, and like Luke Skywalker, power has made Neo a bore. He flies through the sprawling Matrix-city like Superman as dressed by Gaultier; he has portentous dreams about his lover Trinity dying; he fights a thousand Hugo Weavings without once losing his shades. This should be a hoot but isn't. Even during the epic battle with the army of Smith-clones, a slapstick CGI bonanza, the film seems labored and over-serious. The Wachowskis seem to be feeling the pressure of expectations. They want to elevate their story to Dune/Lord of the Rings status, to out-Lucas Lucas, and in doing so totally eliminate the semi-comic, subversive undertones that made the first Matrix amusing. They've become stiffs. The images of Reeves, Fishburne and Moss looking dour and pale - futuristic warriors as ticked-off photophobes - are no longer funny, they're just big and dead, and the whole plot about the fate of Zion and rescuing the keymaster (maybe they should've called Pete Venkman and Egon Spengler in on that one) seems like an act of desperation.
The Wachowskis still know how to orchestrate an action scene, but it's a measure of their failure as storytellers that you think of the action in terms of orchestration instead of just enjoying the thrills. The film provides oodles of material for connoisseurs of wire-work, CGI and slow-mo car-crashes; unfortunately it also satisfies those who relish bad dialogue and listless acting. The single-worst scene must be Fishburne's Paul Atreides speech in front of the assembled population of Zion and the subsequent orgy. The Wachowskis are grabbing for respect here from the kind of people who think fiction starts with Tolkein and ends with Herbert. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films must've intimidated the Wachowskis; they must have thought they had to go for more of an epic and leave behind the rebel-hacker material that supplied the heart of the first Matrix. The sort of silly, pseudo-profound idea that can lend a bit of weight to a sci-fi story has become the purpose of The Matrix Reloaded; the Wachowskis have turned themselves into preachers of some kind of clueless gospel. And only a couple of world-class twerps would make us sit through such a tedious lecture of a movie only to stick us with a cliffhanger. To be continued? Who cares?