Video game on the big screen?

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2003)

I enjoyed the first Matrix much more than this film. This film was a bit too long, with scenes that appeared to be loosely connected to each other without a real flow to them. I was ESPECIALLY disappointed with the special effects. While some of them were spectacular (all car scenes, the evil twin scenes), others (Neo's fight scene with the multiple Smiths, and other scenes where the actors were replaced by computer animation) were extremely bad. I don't know what made them imagine that those graphics were even passable for real actors, but they were not. In short, one minute you have actors facing off, the next minute you are watching a video game on the big screen, which broke any sense of suspended disbelief you had developed till that point. I can still recommend this film for viewing, I gave it a 7 and it was entertaining, but watching the awful animation in this film and others like the Hulk makes me quite concerned about a decidedly bad era of movie special effects driven by the movie maker's belief that their audience is too stupid or blind to tell good effects from a cartoon.