Total, complete utter pointless twaddle!

Rating: 3/10 (31 December 2003)

I just watched THE MATRIX RELOADED and I couldn't believe how bad this movie was. The first MATRIX movie wasn't 100% original and it had its share of plot holes and mistakes (see my IMDb review) but overall, the first movie was tight and I enjoyed the idea of reality vs virtual reality. In THE MATRIX RELOADED, everything that was good in the first film is completely missing. There's no story. There's no new interesting characters. The whole film is made of one long set-piece after another long set-piece, which is very showy and looked like it cost millions but, ultimately, ends up being totally pointless.
There are several things that sink this disaster. The first thing is the seriousness of it all. I don't expect the filmmakers to make fun of themselves but everyone in this movie is so freaking serious that watching it was uninvolving. But the thing that makes me laugh about the seriousness is how everyone is dressed when they're in the matrix world. They all look like they've stepped out of a S&M fashion show created by Versace. How could anyone take these "revolutionaries" seriously when they all looked like overly dressed Eurotrash? And everyone wears sunglasses. So utterly...uncool.
This brings up the scene with Lambert Wilson and Monica Belluci. It's totally embarrassing. I cringed during the entire scene. Lambert Wilson, a French actor who's 100% bilingual and who usually speaks English without a French accent, is made to act like a Frenchman with a stupid French accent. It was so embarrassing for him. And Monica's role is worthless. The idea that the whole crux of the matrix storyline hangs over the petty bourgeois squabblings of an uppity horny French couple renders the whole sci-fi aspects of the series to nothing. If the Keymaker (arf!!!) is so freaking important, why didn't Agent Smith tried to get a hold of the Keymaker from the French couple before Neo & company met them?
The fight scene in the staircase, while Trini and Morpheus run away with the Keymaker, is bad. There's no point to it. It's just padding. In fact, the whole movie is just padding. The car chase scene is incredibly intricate and probably cost millions of dollars. It's the film's highlight but even that scene is utterly pointless and drawn out to the point of ridiculousness. The scene with Morpheus fighting the bad guy on top of the truck was unconvincing, to say the least, certainly when the two trucks smash into each other.
But the worst part in this sequel is Zion. Talk about cheese. For a split second there, I thought I was watching STAR TREK. The way people dressed was totally hilarious. The fact that they live underground, in cave dwelling, and yet everyone is perfectly lit and they all look healthy and their clothes are clean and looked like fashionably politically correct sci-fi crap. God. What a freaking let-down. I thought the first MATRIX movie was a sci-fi movie that tried to deconstruct/reconstruct the sci-fi genre. With MATRIX RELOADED, it's even more cheesy that the 1960s version of THE TIME MACHINE.
As for the whole existence of Zion, well, it's totally ludicrous and flies in the face of the entire MATRIX concept: humans can live underground, with electricity and air, powered by god knows what and yet the evil machines, who are as advanced as the humans, needed humans to generate electricity. Huh?!?! The whole thing just doesn't add up. The point of the first movie was that there wasn't any resources for Machines and humans to survive on the surface of the earth, which is why Machines decided to use Humans as batteries for their world. But now Zion is this fantastically self-sufficient place, where Humans can generate electricity from some unknown source. Please.
There's so much more I could critique, like Neo turning into Paul Atreides from DUNE. Some scenes even looked like David Lynch's DUNE; the scene when Neo fights with hundreds of Agent Smiths; the scene when Trinity and Agent Smith shoot at each other while they're falling (the funniest scene in the whole film); the one-note acting; the dialogue, etc, but I won't because there's no use. It's obvious the Wachowski Brothers painted themselves in a corner with the first movie, which was basically the tip of the iceberg and hinted at things one could only imagined. But now with this sequel, they showed the rest of this iceberg and it's apparent that they didn't have anything new to add to the first movie, which should have been left alone. This sequel is a tedious exercise in total, utter pointlessness.