Overrated, pseudo-mystical garbage w/great SFX

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2003)

POSSIBLE SPOILERS--
This movie was WAY too long. There's like a whole 35-40 minutes of actual story crammed into a two and a half hour long movie...Several characters serve no useful purpose at all whatsoever...Link's wife, was she necessary? What about the councillor and most of the people in Zion? Was there any need to show them in this film? They didn't advance the story at all.
In fact all the Zion scenes were a total waste of time, especially the much reviled rave scene, which does nothing but bring the film to a crashing halt for 15 minutes.
People who say this film is some kind of deep philosophical triumph just make me laugh....you people must experience religious epiphany reading cereal box ingredients. There's nothing original or groundbreaking about this film at all in terms of its philosophical stance, just a bunch of quasi-deep mumbling by the Architect which in the end amounts to nothing and/or contradicts everything they have said before.
Trinity and Neo have no chemistry at all together and are so wooden it's very difficult to care about what happens to them. In the first movie you could actually see them as people instead of some kind of CGI kung fu robot in leather. Fishburne as Morpheus is great as usual but is not enough to carry the film. Apart from Niobe's character there is no other performance worth mentioning.
Of course the SFX are top notch, but for what? Whatever shred of story there is is just a vehicle to get from one action sequence to the next. Were TWO fights vs hundreds of Agent Smiths really necessary, wouldn't one be enough? And then what's up with the fight with the guy who's guarding the Oracle....totally unneccessary other than to show off the same tired bullet time effect, which was used well in the first film but ridiculously overdone in this one. By the 7th or 8th time you've seen it done it's annoying. Not to mention there's no sense of danger involved at all. You KNOW nothing's going to happen to any of the main characters which totally robs all the fight scenes of any sense of drama. We already know who will win.
This movie was very disappointing. I enjoyed the first one a lot because it actually had a plot and a storyline that went somewhere, this was just pure crap. A bunch of action scenes and pseudo-philosophical garbage trying to pass itself off as a smart movie. I guess it is smart for an audience of braindead teenagers. Just stick with action, (you know, where something actually happens), for the 3rd part and maybe this series can be revived.