Cut To The Chase

Rating: 6/10 (18 October 2003)

MATRIX RELOADED is an acquired taste. Hollywood has programmed us now to expect our sequels to be bigger, faster, louder but this one starts off slow.
There's some interesting stuff involving an assault on a tower block and some upgraded Agents but then we're forced to suffer nearly 45 minutes of new age and pseudo-religious exposition that offers no real expansion of concepts already introduced in the original. This is topped by a badly mis-judged love scene between Neo and Trinity inter-cut with footage from what appears to be a huge underground rave which had the audience I saw the movie with laughing out loud! Not, I think, what most people were expecting.
Pulses start to quicken in a scene in which the Oracle reappears and Neo faces an army of Agent Smiths but this sequence, whilst technically ambitious, seems a little mechanical and lifeless (some of the CGI work here is a bit obvious). At this point I was yearning for the movie to start acting and feeling more like the original.
Thankfully, help is on hand with the introduction of a character called Merovingian and his duplicitous wife Persephone. An amusing and charmingly played scene in a restaurant could have been lifted straight out of the first movie being at once witty, frustratingly enigmatic and with that distinctive threatening undertone that characterised the early scenes in the original.
Things then shift up a gear with a well choreographed fight scene between Neo and Merovingian's henchmen followed by the most impressive thing in the movie: a balls-out freeway chase scene that has to rank amongst the most exciting and stunning action sequences ever put on film. This juggernaut of a sequence takes no prisoners. The Wachowski brothers really strut their stuff combining fantastic stunt-work, special effects and their own distinctive camera-style to devastating effect. It's worth the price of admission on it's own and is the sequence that stays with you when the movie is finished. It's timely arrival makes you realise the first movie was not a flash in the pan and you immediately forgive this sequel for it's ponderous start.
The rest of MATRIX RELOADED, whilst not without interest, never really recovers it's stride once the freeway chase is over (it feels like the movie has climaxed) and has the same problem of all middle parts of a trilogy: a sudden and abrupt end.
Purists will no doubt agree with me when I say no one does this stuff like the Wachowskis and this has their stunning visual style stamped all over it. Having now seen the film a few times, I can say it does stand up to repeated viewings but, once seen, it's that terrific middle section you wait for during subsequent viewings.
MATRIX RELOADED is definitely a much better film than the third part of the trilogy, MATRIX REVOLUTIONS. I was expecting REVOLUTIONS to mean revolutionary whereas it actually seems to mean revolving constantly whilst going nowhere. Unfortunately for this trilogy, MATRIX RELOADED is as good as it gets.