Did you ever feel like you got cheated? 
Rating: 4/10 (6 November 2003)

For what it's worth, seeing this movie could have been better spent losing out at the card tables. At least someone could have gone home happy. The best way to describe this movie is.. for the whole series actually.. is that it's like having interruptus during $ex. Great foreplay for the first one that had us all drooling for more, the second one tantalized us more than it pleased us, and when it came time to deliver the finale- what we got was climactic disappointment. I wasn't so enthusiastic about "Reloaded" (no pun intended) either, but I assured myself that the third part would make everything make sense; solve all the weird mysteries; and still have room for some shocker revelation that would blow away all sci-fi films. Instead, the only landmark this movie seems to set is that it's the first time the story is better told in a video game than in a movie. At least the second one had a really kick ass car chase scene on the highway where Morpheus got to shine as he took down a BMW with a samurai blade. And there were also those cool badass albino twins. This one had no interesting villains- introduced too many characters too late (not that they were all bad characters - just that there were too many and too short of time to do their development), and no interesting philosophical questions to debate. The original three: Trinity, Morpheus, and Neo get rather small and useless roles. It seems even the walk-ons and stage-hands were able to squeeze into this one (who the heck was that reloader kid? And did they really need Sati in that many scenes?). If its anything to the movie's credit- most of the critcism derives from hyping up the trilogy to such an extent only to offer a B quality flick in the end. The Zion battle was cool in general, but I think everyone expected the whole movie to be that gripping. It's a shame they didn't involve the original 3 more- as it would have given the movie more depth. In my book, I rate this as a 4.5 which translates to "not worth seeing in the theatre; wait for it on VHS- don't even bother with the DVD much less some special director's cut version"
Man, Return of the King better be good... as must the next Star Wars...