100 more minutes should have gone to the cutting room floor

Rating: 3/10 (15 May 2003)

I rated the original Matrix a 10 out of 10 due to the great story, fantastic visual effects and one of the best sound tracks I've heard in a movie (and not just the musical scoring.)
So when my son invited me to the midnight showing of Matrix Reloaded(first showing on the day of release) I jumped at the chance to go. All I had to spend was the $3.00 for parking my car.
After what seemed like four hours later, the movie ended and I felt like I'd wasted that $3.00 and a few hours of sleep.
I imagine that the Matrix Reloaded will make a ton of money. It has everything that the junior and senior high school kids love: Lots of fight scenes, loud techno music (and I use the term loosely), lots of fight scenes, some bare flesh, lots of fight scenes, car chases and crashes, lots of fight scenes and some great special effects. Oh, and we can't forget all of the fight scenes. Plus just to try to claim a message for the movie, there was a lot of psychobabble thrown in as an afterthought.
It is hard to believe that the same people who made The Matrix, made The Matrix Reloaded. It reminds me of certain computer products that Symantec bought, lobotomized and then repackaged.
Aiming towards the teen target audience, the fight scenes were enhanced and lengthened to perhaps five times as long as they should have been. It was much like watching a porno... the same action over and over (usually with the same two characters) from different angles.
The only redeeming features of this movie were the special effects. Everything else was overdone, drawn out and obvious filler.
In a nutshell... Matrix Reloaded could have been cut to 18 minutes and tacked onto the Matrix, or left to start Matrix Revolutions and we wouldn't have missed a thing.