Will Zion fall to the Sentinels? Is the Oracle to be believed? Can the Keymaker be found? And how many times will the Architect contrive to use the word "ergo" in a single scene? And, when faced with the Lady-or-Tiger dilemma of saving Carrie-Anne Moss or the entire human race, whom will Neo choose? And finally, can anybody make heads or tails of any of this? Like so many sequels, this one seems to assume that the viewer will have purchased the video or DVD of the previous installment and committed it to memory, thereby absolving the filmmakers (the Wachowski brothers, Andy and Larry) from the drudgery of plot exposition. And like so many planned trilogies (the first Star Wars cycle, the second Star Wars cycle, The Lord of the Rings, etc.), as opposed to an unplanned trilogy like The Godfather, this middle installment feels like merely marking time and taking up space. And like so many FX movies, it looks and sounds a little disingenuous in its championing of humans over machines: "But we control these machines," asserts Neo, whistling in the dark. "They don't control us." (The humans, supposing Neo to be one, are not just engulfed in CG imagery but are occasionally and obviously transformed into it themselves.) And like so many movies of any stripe these days, the opaque and/or flimsy and/or Swiss-cheesy narrative of this one is no more than a pretext for surface spectacle, primarily in this case the fashion-modelling of sunglasses-and-raincoat ensembles. More simply, this movie is pretty much like a lot of movies. And the final installment could not come along soon enough to protect the second from forgettability. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Harold Perrineau, Hugo Weaving, and Monica Bellucci. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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