Runtime: 138 minutes
Directed by: The people known at the time as The Wachowski Brothers
Starring: Many famous faces
From: Warner Bros.
A first-time watch... no, really. I admitted in my review of the OG Matrix back in September 2019 that I had seen nothing from the franchise past the original even though I was an adult in '99 when the first Matrix happened. It's a very good movie and all but in '03-which wasn't a good year for me anyhow-I did not go to the cinplex often, I was in college and all the bad buzz concerning the sequels kept me away all this time. Finally, on a whim I decided to give it a shot; the fact that the movie is on HD via HBO Max also helped pushed me in this direction.
Overall, “meh” was my reaction. It seemed like parts of the story were missing before Part 2 began. Then we get a story where the basic idea was fine (Christ figure Neo needs to go through various steps in order to help the babyfaces prevent the enemies reaching their area where they likely will get slaughtered) but in execution, much of this was meh-not to mention meandering-and I scoffed/rolled my eyes way too often. Forced romances did not help; the same goes for some incredibly irritating characters. But for me, the worst aspect is that too much of the action-especially the fight scenes-just looked phony and not engaging. The nadir of that was that preposterous Neo vs. Agent Smith and 100 of his clones battle... which for some reason is commonly referred to as The Burly Brawl?! That grew sillier and sillier until I started literally laughing out loud at how it looked like I was viewing someone else play a bad videogame.
Even the setpiece I heard was a standout-the chase on the freeway-was just dumb to me. Not only was it over the top to the point of farce, the whole aspect of that “program” entering other bodies to try and hunt down our heroes... I was never a fan of that but that was more of an issue when combined with those ludicrous dreadlocked albino twins and their special powers. Even Neo flying around like Superman took me out of the story. The movie is not all bad: besides the unintentional humor-how can I not laugh at everyone deciding to have a RAVE after hearing a rousing speech from Morpheus where he says that there should be no worry of the machines reaching them-Zion was still visually a delight and hasn't aged poorly, which I can't say about all of the effects. There is still nice philosophical & interesting discussion at times-that and some exciting moments do help make this not a disaster.
Perhaps it is unfair to give a rating to this without having viewed Revolutions as from what I understand this dovetails into that rather neatly; still, I'll rate each on its own merits... or demerits. This is not like the Bourne movies where I realized the first three should have been viewed much sooner; I don't feel so bad about waiting 18 years for this.
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