The Matrix Resurrections review

Everything about the first Matrix holds up. For a movie so of its time that is largely unheard of.

But they really would have been better off stopping at one.

The Matrix Reloaded to this day ranks as one of the most disappointing movies of.all time.

I actually kind of.like The Matrix Revolutions, but that's primarily due to the incredible sentinel battle sequence in the middle of the movie. The bookends are weak. 

Reloaded made money, but the poor response to it torpedoed Revolutions, and that was it for the franchise. Until now. 

The Matrix Resurrections could have been an interesting sequel. Instead it mostly gives you all the worst aspects of the sequels, with little of the good.

It is another of these franchise sequels lately that essentially negates the ending of the previous film. At the end of the original trilogy, Neo and the machines had reached a sort of truce. Neo sacrificed himself. Trinity got killed. 

All that is tossed aside to justify the story here. Turns out the machines resurrected Neo and Trinity, and placed both back into a sort of upgraded matrix world. Neo believes he is a video game designer, who got famous for creating a trilogy of games called...The Matrix. Ha ha. And his boss tells him that their own bosses at Warner Brothers (ha ha) want a new Matrix. Ha...ha. 

The metaness is off the charts in the first third of this movie. It's so self-satisfied. And not nearly as witty as the filmmakers think it is. 

We end up with somewhat a retread of the plot of the first movie, with Neo once again being awakened to the knowledge that he is in the Matrix and being led out by a Trinity figure (Jessica Henwick's Bugs) and a Morpheus figure (Yahya Abdul-Mateen)...who might actually be Morpheus or something. I dunno, they didn't bring back Laurence Fishburne so this is what they came up with. 

The liveliest, most engaging actor in the movie by far is Henwick, who was easily the highlight of Iron Fist and here is just simply cool as hell.

Neil Patrick Harris never fits as Neo's Matrix world therapist. A couple of OT actors return, but to little effect. And I don't know why they needed to pile on the old age makeup for Jada Pinkett Smith.

The third act is all about trying to get Trinity out of the Matrix. That's fine, I guess, but you really need to be invested in Neo and Trinity as a couple to care. The romance between them was a dead stick in the OT, but here it is retconned into being the most important part of the whole story.

What most dooms this movie into mediocrity is the complete lack of a single standout action sequence. The original film had a ton, but even the sequels delivered some incredible set pieces. This one really doesn't have any. There is no new special fx advancement here. But we get a lot of the dull, pretentious speechifying that the other sequels had.

Even Keanu Reeves is rendered a dull presence. He's older now, of course, but the John Wick movies show he can still handle action. This movie gives him so little to do on that front.

This is a movie that just did not need to be made, and everyone involved seemed to have known that.