THE MATRIX RELOADED (2003)  **

Reviewed 5/16/03

A Zion populated by Ed Wood B-movie extras auditioning for America Bandstand during a blackout, a Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) who looks like he’s on the Marlon Brando diet, a Zion leader (Anthony Zerbe) who might as well have been played by Leslie Nielsen, and a movie that doesn’t have the guts to fulfill its opening dream premonition is just a few of this flick’s many problems. Add to that long dead patches of pseudo-philosophizing about choice and free will, a lack of romantic heat between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) despite their constant liplocking, and some surprisingly lethargic action scenes, and the Wachowski brothers have sorely come down from the exhilarating high of the first film.

Despite being heavily derivative of cyberpunk literature and Hong Kong action, the first MATRIX kept one-upping its narrative invention as it moved along. RELOADED doesn’t even have a sustained story arc. It’s about a lot of little problems that go nowhere fast: Neo seeking his purpose, Zion readying for battle against the machine sentinels, Morpheus in a love triangle with Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Commander Lock (Harry Lennix looking constipated), and the quest for the GHOSTBUSTER’s Keymaster, I mean, the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim). Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), reincarnated with new powers and no explanation, or some other baddie turns up every so often to contrive another action scene. The two most famous RELOADED set pieces – Neo battling scores of Agent Smiths and a highway car chase – are impressive, but in neither case does anything feel at stake. There’s no sense of danger. They are simply spectacle for its own sake. For all the massive carnage on display in the highway sequence, it doesn’t rival the two greatest car chases in movies (in my humble opinion) – lacking the effortless grace of Jackie Chan’s motorcycle chase in OPERATION CONDOR: ARMOUR OF GOD II and missing the human element in the climax of THE ROAD WARRIOR. And the fight scenes just don’t have as much physicality this time around. Characters get hit, but there’s no real impact. The power involved feels as virtual as the Matrix itself.

When the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) reveals the history of the Matrix and the place of the One in it, what’s initially interesting quickly turns into dullsville as he drones on and on, blah, blah, blah. The goings-on in Zion resemble the “Battlestar Galactica” pilot. The movie’s finest moment comes in the interaction between Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) and his wife Persephone (Monica Bellucci) because the love/hate game playing between them is the film’s one brief instance of emotional complexity. Merovingian also gets the film’s best line, “Okay, you are good.”