The Matrix Reloaded Review

The freeway chase is one of the great action sequences of the century and it is stranded inside a film with no idea what to do around it. The Wachowskis had a mile and a half of road built at a decommissioned naval station, and the fourteen minutes shot there, with Carrie-Anne Moss threading a motorcycle against traffic while the twins phase through cars, is almost entirely practical and completely legible.

Then the film goes back to talking. Neo now has to explain himself, which is the worst available use of Keanu Reeves, and the script buries its ideas under a vocabulary of causality and purpose and choice that sounds profound while resolving nothing. The Architect scene is the low point, a man in a chair delivering paragraphs of subordinate clauses to a character not permitted to argue back.

The Zion material, especially the cave rave intercut with a love scene, stops the picture dead. Bill Pope keeps the sickly green grade and the compositions remain handsome, but the Burly Brawl trades his photography for a hundred rubbery digital Smiths and the seams show badly now. Hugo Weaving is still the best thing in the trilogy. Half a great film, padded out by the sequel it had to set up.