Start the Revolutions without me

Rating: Null/10 (8 November 2003)

When I saw Reloaded back in May I wasn't overly impressed with it, but I excused a lot of it's poorness by saying it'll be made better by the third installment. I naively thought that all the shoddy half-developed ideas in the second part would be settled in Revolutions. What kind of fool am I?
Revolutions has just the same problems as Reloaded. Ok there's not as much middling philosophy but there's still a lot of very awkward dialogue. I'm talking Star Wars prequel bad here. And there seems to be too much stuff going on that just doesn't fit in. The way I see it, they could have made one great Matrix sequel with all the good ideas that they had. Instead they spread these out over two films and padded them with obvious filler material.
I'll give you the best example of this I can without landing in heavy spoiler territory. Do you remember how Reloaded ended? The supposed cliffhanger. Where you see Bane, the guy 'possessed' by Agent Smith, lying on board the ship with Keanu and gang. Which wasn't really anything close to being a twist cliffhanger, since we'd seen him twice already in the film earlier, and he didn't seem very threatening then anyway. ('Right I'm going to kill Neo with this knife. Ah no he's turned around. I won't do it now.') Sorry I digress. I'm supposed to be writing about Revolutions. Right, so that plot-line is carried on a bit and I was stunned at how crap it's played out. Plus the unfortunate actor is forced into trying to be Hugo Weaving cool. I'll credit him for really trying. He can't manage it though.
But hey, at least it has good action scenes to counter-balance all this rubbish, right? Well.......... no. There's a shoot-out that's just like the lobby shootout from the first Matrix, only not as good. There's the bit that the trailers always showed, with the big robot thingys shooting the thousands of sentinels. Which from an effects viewpoint is very impressive. However this becomes numbingly repetitive and drags on far too long. Leaving just the fight between Neo and Smith as the only really good action bit. One out of three is not a very admirable score.
And to make matters worse they take everything WAY too seriously. You might argue that they're trying to make a serious story, but Lord of the Rings is a dark serious story and yet Peter Jackson understands that you need to have lightness now and again. It makes the darker scenes stand out more. Oh and I'm not even going to get started on all the Messiah overtones otherwise I'll be here all blinking day.
But hmm, after all of that, I have to add there is still *some* good stuff to see. The aforementioned Hugo Weaving. He doesn't have a large amount of screen time but that which he does have is quality. And Bruce Spence is nothing short of a shining star.
In the end though I'm tempted just to be content watching the original Matrix now and again, and blocking out the existence of both sequels from my mind forever.