If I could wipe one film from my memory, it would be this one

Rating: 1/10 (14 January 2009)

This film, to put it shortly, throws out everything interesting about the first film's intelligent plot and replaces it with a run-of-the-mill "space battle against evil robots" plot. Multiple new characters are introduced, none of them interesting enough to remember. Oh, and one of them turns out to be a bad guy. Shocking, if I could remember his name! A few throwaway lines reveal that ghosts and other fantasy creatures exist in the Matrix, which would be interesting if it were actually part of the plot, instead of just a pretext for introducing another few personality-less henchmen with nifty effects.
All this would merely make for a mediocre film. It's the sexism and obscenity that takes this to truly epic levels of badness. The chocolate cake scene was mind-blowingly disgusting. I almost wish I'd seen a censored PG-rated version of the film, simply not to be exposed to that mess of fanservice and bad-taste humour. Sorry, but that's rape, that's not funny. One wonders if the film would even have been greenlit if the victim had been male. But oh no, presumably the Wachowskis wouldn't have thought that a man being subject to an unwanted sexual assault was sexy enough.
And what the hell is with the Francophobia relating to the Merovingian? If any French people managed not to walk out during his scenes, I salute them. The "French people are decadent" stereotype is cringeworthy enough, but his name almost made this an intentional national slur. (How would the people behind this film feel if a foreign film introduced an obese, over-sexed, cheeseburger-munching badguy with a thick American accent and named him "the Founding Father"?) As if the sexism of those scenes weren't enough, we also find out that Trinity needs to be saved. Through the, I kid you not, "kiss of life" scene, which would have made me cry in pain if I weren't already numb from earlier. That ending would have been too cheesy even for a teenager's first school film, yet somehow it passed.
Any good sides? Well, I enjoyed some of the set-piece battles, and the SFX are great. Which, in a way, is a pity: if this film looked like "Manos", it would be easier to spot the bad script, cardboard characters, and juvenile bouts of sexism and xenophobia.
Nearly as bad as "Conan the Destroyer", but more offensive. If I could give it negative stars, I would.