getting to work on this film when it was made back in the summer of 1990. Shot partly in the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC and the remaining parts in Winston-Salem. The massive offices of the RJ Reynolds were used in several office scenes and places in around the beautiful city that is know as the tulip capital of the world Winston-Salem! I enjoyed my work although it was exceedingly hard work building all the sets like the Golf of Mexico where Renee Russo and Jim Belushi went on their date. I also had a big hand in decorating the bar where Larry encounters the magical bartender Mr. Destiny. I tacked all those pics on the wall of sports heroes and decorated that phone booth where larry makes a phone call for a cab. I even put my mothers photo at eye level so i could freeze frame it and show it to her when we watched it. I remember dyeing the grass at his old house with green dye because it first had to be sodded(it was a new house in a new development and I guess they leased it for the movie)..then I had to cut that newly laid sod to make it look nice..man that was hard! As far as the movie, when we made it we had no idea what it would be like but after seeing it i fell in love with it because really tells the story of "what if" as good as I ever had seen it, including the great It's a Wonderful Life. I cried so many times
i can't count. I got to meet the wonderful actor Michael Caine while shooting scenes at an old minor league ballpark where Larry's boyhood scenes were played and replayed. I remember after he had done a take an was heading back to his trailer, I ran him down and asked him for a picture and he was quite amiable and said "why not!" He is a good guy and a really natural and forceful actor. I can't say the same for Jim Belushi..he was so full of himself, smoking big cuban cigars and talking loudly so
everyone in earshot could hear his every word. His career never did take off but he has had a decent TV career recently. I would say watch this movie if you ever get the chance. It's wonderful and really heartfelt and real. You can feel Larry's pain after he enters into the new world Mr. Destiny gives him after hitting the homer, and as he wants so badly for people to believe he is not this bad guy everyone thinks he is. They all think he belongs in a nuthouse! But eventually he wins people over but by then he wants his real life back so badly, especially his wonderful wife, played so beautifully by Linda Hamilton..and he wants his dog back! So see it.

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Continued...
From here on in the whole movie collapses in on itself. First we meet a rogue program with the indication we're gonna get ghosts and vampires and werewolves and the like. We get a guy with a retarded accent talking endless garbage, two 'ghosts' that serve no real purpose and have no character what-so-ever and a bunch of henchmen. Someone's told me they're vampires (straight out of Blade 2), but they're so undefined I didn't realise.
The funny accented guy with a ridiculous name suffers the same problem as the Oracle, only for far longer and far far worse. He has a simple point about cause and effect, makes it, then continues to make it and make it until it becomes convoluted and stupid. His final line before walking off is comparable to Storm's "do you know what happens to a toad..." line in X-men in levels of utter bland baddness. The chocolate cake is such a lazy, pathetic cliche and Monica Bellucci as the wife does nothing other than exactly what we expect the moment we see her.
And then we get another kung fu fight!!! WHY? Neo is, allegedly, The One. He can do anything. He has the ultimate power and what does he use it for. Kung bloody fu all the time. And while he can stop 1000 bullets, he still gets cut by a sword and still makes a meal of 5 undecipherable henchmen (vampires?). I wanted to see mind blowing powers. I wanted to see him do the wildest, craziest most insane s*** to people because he can do anything. I got the same as before without the 'wow'.
The fabled car chase. That can't be bad. Well... no, it's not. It's just not what we've been tyold it was going to be. ALL the cool shots from this scene are in the trailer. Every one. So all possibly Wow has been taken from us so all we now get is a good chase sequence with, guess what, a kung fu fight!!! OK, it's not Neo, but you'd have thought he'd have explained to his closest friends about the reality of the Matrix. At least taught them something. It's not hard.
"Hey, Morpheus, don't worry about what happens to you in the matrix. It's not real. As long as you understand that nothing's real then nothing can really harm you."
There you go. Simple.
OK, so the chase is not bad. It's never boring and it doesn't seem like 16 minutes. It's just so underwhelming. And still, it gets worse.
The final climax to the movie is quite probably the worst imaginable. They have this whole elaborate plan that involves three crews. They then only show it sporadically between Morpheus's over long, super preachy, monologue. To make it worse, they never clearly define what this plan that needs 3 teams is. You know basically, but you don't know who's doing what, when, so when one crew goes down you just don't care and you don't know how this is going to affect what goes on.
I'll sum it up though, it happens so Trinity can get back into the Matrix to setup the end. That's the only reason it happens. Which raises the question, why did they need to send 6 people originally? Trinity gets in in five minutes by herself!
Neo's journey to the centre of the Matrix (so to speak) is handled equally lazily. Ooohhh!!! He runs into another 100 Agent Smiths!!! Woooooo!!! That must've taken a lot of thought. Only now they're in a corridor so the fight has no scale and is over in a moment. Man, what a grand finale!!!
And then the Architect!!!
Remember everything I said was bad about the Oracle and the foreign guy? Add them together and double it, that's how truly appalling the Architect is. The only reasonable potential of him is he's about to set up the cliffhanging climax.
And then he blows it!
Let's look at the options he gives Neo. Choose one door and all humanity dies (except 27!!!). Choose the other and all humanity dies!!! Considering choice is something this film tries to explore it doesn't really give it's hero one. If he had a choice of Save humanity and the missus dies or Save the missus and kill humanity there's the potnetial for inner torment and tension. Also, with Trinity being mid fall, the potential of a real cliffhanger that would've made seeing the third more essential. But no. He has save no-one or save the missus.
Now, the very worst thing about the original Matrix was Neo dying and then coming back to life right at the end. The year it came out everyone was so annoyed by how stupid Jar Jar was they didn't notice that the very end of The Matrix made him look him Steven Hawking. "The Oracle told me I'd fall in love with the One, and I love you".... Come On!!!! How can the whole world have missed how utterly terrible that was?
So, what do the Wachowski's do in the sequel? Well, they make the ending of the original look better. How? Well, by doing almost exactly the same thing again (only swapping characters) only so much worse I think my f a and r keys would be worn out if I kept writing far before I got to worse.
And the cliffhanger is just not really a cliffhanger. It's a reminder.
Basically, this film is just bad. I really didn't want it to be bad, but it is. Bad in just so many ways. And to make matters worse, this isn't a film with not enough budget. It's not a film with too short a schedule. It's not a film that's been rushed out. It's not a film where too much influence has come from the outside. This is exactly the film the Wachowski's set out to make with Warner's fortune fully behind them. And that's what makes this so awful. At least Rancid Aluminium can say that it didn't haev enough time or money.
Matrix Reloaded. The worst film ever made? Maybe not quite. The most disappointing and defalting film ever made.
Undeniably.