Revolutions turns into your standard Hollywood action movie - big on explosions, small on brains.

Rating: 4/10 (5 November 2003)

Andy and Larry Wachowski have written and directed themselves into a hole. The original Matrix was an intelligent and refreshing science-fiction film. The Matrix Reloaded was a rehash that pretended to be intelligent by spewing out a bunch of fortune cookie philosophies and a series of unanswerable questions meant to keep the diehards believing that this moneymaking venture was leading to something meaningful. The Matrix Revolutions drops all pretenses and turns into your standard Hollywood action movie - big on explosions, small on brains.
An advantage Revolutions has over Reloaded is with its characters. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), in particular. For some unknown reason, Morpheus became this sort of Jesse Jackson meets Yoda type character in the second film. He was boring and pretentious. It looked as though his face would crack if he even attempted to smile. In the third film, with his faith in The One shaken, he's a far more human character. By the end, he becomes almost likable. At the same time, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) has become even more egocentric and out of control. He makes for a wonderful bad guy, and Weaving does an excellent job of upping-the-ante in the third film, to give the audience the feeling that Smith is a real threat that needs to be stomped out, at all costs. His performance adds a level of tension to the film that it almost doesn't deserve. It also makes the final confrontation between Smith and Neo, this one labeled the "Super Burly Brawl," far more exciting than the Burly Brawl in Reloaded. Sadly, it can't save the battle between Christ (Neo) and the Anti-Christ (Agent Smith) from an unsatisfying ending.
The ability to avoid looking for the answers is the only way you'll be able to enjoy this film. If you turn your brain off for The Matrix Revolutions in the same way you would for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, you'll have an okay time. But the Matrix trilogy was supposed to be the exception to the big-budget rule. Instead of turning your mind off, these movies were meant to make you think. If the questions asked in Reloaded were actually answered in Revolutions, this could have been an incredible film. Sadly, newsgroup predictions of what would happen in The Matrix Reloaded, typed out by hardcore fans of the series, have been more interesting than what the Wachowski brothers eventually came up with.