A bunch of effects thrown together, do not a good action film make.

Rating: 3/10 (28 May 2009)

So James McAvoy plays a bored office worker whose being chased by this killer and saved by Angelina Jolie's character to be hired by a group of assassins who maintain the balance of order in the world by a magic weaving machine (I kid you not!) they can make bullets bend and have the ability to perform superhuman feats but seemingly without super-human abilities and it is all a big excuse to use yet more matrixy effects bit without the reasoning, logic or sense.
This film is a terrible indictment of some of the summer dross we have been getting over recent years, and sadly, because people don't know how to rate action movies they just heap praise on stuff without thinking of whether it is worthy of that praise, and this was one of those films.
The matrix has rules and an ideology central to the story to mean that the effects are essential to the story, in too many films at the moment the story seems to be a reason to put certain effects scenes together and jeez they are poor. No emotional involvement did I ever feel for the characters, even when the magic weave machine gave out their names and put them in jeopardy. One of the things there should always be in any action film is a sense of danger and their never was here. It is just a collection of well constructed sequences with little emotional resonance in between.
This is tedious fare indeed and it's sad that it's managed to get a rating this high when so much better films barely get over nine.
Nuff said!