In a sentenceA hundred Hugo Weavings, a motorway, and ninety minutes of men in sunglasses explaining causality
The machines are drilling down towards Zion, the last human city, and a quarter of a million of their sentinels will reach it in a matter of days. Neo (Keanu Reeves), now able to fly inside the Matrix, is troubled by a recurring dream of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) falling from a window under gunfire. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) believes the Oracle (Gloria Foster) will tell them how the war ends; Commander Lock (Harry Lennix), who runs Zion’s defences, thinks Morpheus is a fanatic. Back in the Matrix, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) has survived his own deletion, no longer answers to the system, and has learned to copy himself onto anyone he touches. The Oracle sends Neo after a prisoner called the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim), held by a Frenchman known as the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson).
Plays from YouTube when you press play; nothing loads from them until then.
The Wachowskis’ sequel contains two action sequences that were worth the four-year wait and a script that stops every twenty minutes for a speech about choice. The fights are better than the speeches, and there are more speeches.
Four years after The Matrix (1999), the Wachowskis return with a sequel. The job this time is to widen the world: show us Zion, the last human city, explain what the machines want, and tell us whether Neo (Keanu Reeves) really is the One. The film does the first of those well, the second at great length, and the third it declines to answer. It is a 138-minute action film with two superb sequences and about forty minutes of talk.
The motorway chase is the thing people remember. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) rides a motorbike against the traffic with the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim) on the pillion; Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) fights an agent on the roof of a moving lorry with a sword; cars fold under other cars. Bill Pope shoots it in hard daylight, so the metal looks heavy, and Zach Staenberg cuts it so we always know where everyone is, which is rarer than it sounds. We sat forward and stayed there until it was over.
The other sequence belongs to Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), who has come back able to copy himself onto anyone he touches. He arrives in a courtyard with a dozen of himself and then a hundred, all in Kym Barrett’s identical suits and dark glasses, and Neo takes them on with a steel pole. For three minutes it is the best fight the series has staged, and then the camera pulls back and the two men become figures of weightless digital rubber. Once Neo was no longer a man, nothing in that courtyard could hurt him, and we stopped caring whether it did.
Between the fights, people sit down and explain. Morpheus preaches to Zion from a balcony. Commander Lock (Harry Lennix) tells him he is a fanatic, and is not wrong. The Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), a Frenchman who runs a restaurant and keeps a prisoner, delivers a lecture on cause and effect while watching a woman eat cake. The Oracle (Gloria Foster) tells Neo he has already made his choice and is here to understand it. Each speech is about choice, and by the fourth we were looking at our watch.
Zion itself is a mixed success. Owen Paterson builds it as a vast cave of rusted gantries and pipework. The Wachowskis then stage a rave in it, intercut with Neo and Trinity in bed, over Don Davis’s drums and choir, and we were bored and then slightly embarrassed on everyone’s behalf. The people of Zion are better than the party. Harold Perrineau’s Link, the new operator, and Nona Gaye’s Zee give the city a marriage to worry about, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe has a sharpness nobody else in the cast is allowed.
Reeves plays Neo as a man who has already won and is politely waiting to be told what he has won, and it is hard to fear for him. Fishburne is given sermons and delivers them like sermons. Moss keeps the stakes human; the dream of her falling backwards through a window is the only image in the film we were afraid of. Monica Bellucci, as the Merovingian’s wife Persephone, wears a white dress that appears to have been applied rather than put on, and her scene is sillier than anyone involved seems to think.
The Matrix had one idea, that the world is a cage you cannot see, and spent its whole length showing us the bars. Reloaded has a dozen ideas, most of them about free will, and says them rather than shows them. The motorway alone is worth an evening. Watch it at home with someone who loved the first one; you will both enjoy the chase, talk through the Merovingian, and argue about the rest. It carries a 15 certificate and came out in British cinemas on 21 May 2003.
Most critics find The Matrix Reloaded a qualified success, and the reviews lean more warm than cold. Nearly everyone agrees that the action is the reason to watch: the freeway chase comes up in review after review as the film’s high point, and the fight between Neo and a crowd of Agent Smiths is close behind. The praise clusters on the stunt choreography, the performers’ physical work and the scale of the effects rather than on anything the characters say or think.
The reservations cluster just as tightly. Critics complain that the story is overcomplicated, the philosophy thin and the whole thing less fresh than the first film, and several note that it is slow to get going. The spread is fairly wide, from four-star notices to two outright rejections. The AV Club goes furthest, finding the mythology muddled and the characters flat, while the Los Angeles Times adds that the large-format print shows up weaknesses in the computer effects.
The review finds the film flawed and slow to get going, but ultimately a thrilling action spectacle. It especially praises the freeway chase for its dazzling choreography and visual freedom.
Read the full review →Walker finds the film a dazzling, entertaining spectacle despite its thin philosophy and eventual weariness. He especially praises the gravity-defying fight against Agent Smith’s duplicates and the spectacular freeway sequence.
Read the full review →Mackie finds the sequel less conceptually fresh than the original but highly entertaining. He especially praises the Smith-clone fight and freeway chase, highlighting their choreography and spectacle.
Read the full review →McCarthy finds the sequel thrilling and compulsively watchable, though less fresh and mysterious than the original. He singles out the freeway chase as an exhilarating showcase of action staging and stunt choreography.
Read the full review →Kennedy gives the film a qualified thumbs-up, finding its action exhilarating despite a cumbersome, sometimes confusing story. He singles out the Burly Brawl, freeway chase and other set pieces, along with the performers’ physical work.
Read the full review →The URL identifies a review of the specified film, but the page content is inaccessible. The critic’s verdict and any specific praise or complaint cannot be verified.
Read the full review →Part of · 2 of 3
Ghost in the ShellThe anime the Wachowskis studied; quieter, shorter, and it finishes its thoughts.
Dark CityA false city, a man who wakes up, and far less talk about it.
Hard BoiledJohn Woo’s gunfights, which the courtyard and the motorway are both borrowing from.
Fist of Legend · not reviewed yetJet Li fighting the way Neo is supposed to, with a body that can be hurt.
Cloud Atlas · not reviewed yetThe Wachowskis again, with six stories and the same appetite for ideas, better digested.
Free account
Two lists that know where things are streaming, collections you can share, your own score beside ours, and Discover that remembers what you have seen.
