Matrix: Revolutions is painful

Many Matrix fans were disappointed and disgusted by the second movie in the trilogy, Matrix: Reloaded. Well, compared to Matrix: Revolutions, Reloaded deserves the Best Picture Oscar.

Revolutions is a horrific mess of filmmaking. In making this movie, the Wachowski brothers carefully examined everything that made the first Matrix incredible and threw it away. They ended up with a laughable plot, awful acting and a hugely over-hyped sequel.

The movie begins with Neo (Keanu Reeves) trapped in a world between that of the Matrix and the machines. To rescue him, Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) and the mysterious Seraph break into a leather fetish club. They persuade (with a pistol) the club's owner, the Merovingian, to bring Neo back to the Matrix so they can get him back to reality.

Then all of these main characters, the focal points of the trilogy, basically disappear for a solid hour. In their place, viewers are treated to a painfully long sequence of giant human-controlled machines blowing up millions of robots to defend the last human city of Zion. This battle could have been very cool had the visual effects artists bothered to put more than five minutes worth of work into it. There are better computer graphics on many Play Station II games.

In the end, though, the human armies are of course no match for the robots, and it's up to Neo to save the human race by traveling back into the Matrix to defeat arch-nemesis Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) once and for all. This time, instead of just punching and kicking like they always do, they fly while they punch and kick. And it's raining. Can you feel the power of this anticlimactic moment?

Sadly, Revolutions bears almost no resemblance to Matrix. Gone are the exciting slow motion fight scenes, gone is the trademark "Bullet-time" special effect, gone is the punchy techno music. The fight for Zion bears more resemblance to a bad World War II movie than anything Matrix-like and is ultimately as anticlimactic as the rest of the movie. The main characters get maybe ten minutes of screen time each, elbowed aside by annoying side characters. There is one (JUST ONE) gunfight in more than two hours of screen time. Even Reloaded had a solid hour of gun-slinging mayhem.

This movie turned out so tragically because the Wachowski brothers, the directors, bit off more than they could chew. They are clearly capable of making good action movies, but Revolutions proves that they should stay away from any attempt to write dialogue or a plot. Finally, an acting coach or two might have helped – for once, Reeves is possibly not the worst actor on screen.

There are a few bright spots in this train wreck. The first fifteen or twenty minutes are actually fairly entertaining, with most of the action centered on the world of the Matrix and before the movie shifts to all kinds of irritating side plots and locations (for instance, the Machine City. Who saw that one coming?). Aside from these few promising moments, though, there is honestly nothing worth seeing in Revolutions. Don't waste your money on this sequel, just rent the original and watch it a few more times.

Matrix: Revolutions is rated R for violence and is now playing everywhere.