Paperjam

Matrix Revolutions - Oh Dear

Film // Jim // 18th November 2003

Some happy day if you are very good, your employers will decide that you are ready to become management material. They will send you away on courses to hateful buildings with strip lighting and jugs of lukewarm water on the desks. A man whose idea of having a personality only extends to his tie collection explains a variety of ways to tell people that they are rubbish and that you are going to sack them, or that they have body odour issues.

One of the most entertaining techniques is the humourously-named “shit-sandwich” in which your real message of contempt and doom is sandwiched between two lighter observations so as to lighten the blow and encourage improvement.
A good example of this would be any meeting I have with my boss which usually run along the following lines:

“Jim, I was really impressed that you made it to your desk by midday today, but I also have to tell that you are an evil, lazy bastard with no redeeming features who a slow lingering death would probably be too good for. By the way I liked the font you used on that incredibly dull report I asked you to do for me last week.”

You get the idea. With that in mind here is the paper-jam review of Matrix Revolutions....


The seats in the cinema were quite comfortable.

What a complete pile of shite! The first one was great, the second one was quite good, this is terrible; probably the most disappointing film I’ve ever seen when you consider what preceded it.
You are lulled into a false sense of excitement by an OK first half hour with a mystical subway station and a nifty upside down fight in a nightclub concluding with the appearance of the amusing French geezer and the super-duper Monica Bellucci. It is downhill from there with incredibly repetitive and strangely uninvolving action sequences partnered with acting and dialogue so corny you need a combine harvester to get through it.
Disturbingly, all the messianic stuff alluded to in the first films gets really quite sickening by the end with choirs kicking off and a cruciform Reeves glowing angelically at the climax.
When I saw it people were openly laughing in the cinema at the awfulness of various scenes, my personal favourite was the none-more-cliched marine captain who banged on about “being in the corps” and then descended into screaming “AAARRGGHHH .... AAAAHHHHRRRRRR ... AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH” for a good half an hour while special effects flew around him. The whole battle scene was like being at a particularly grim primal scream therapy session.
During what is supposed to be a particularly heart-wrenching moment of the plot I clearly heard someone behind me say “Just hurry up and die you bitch”.
The really upsetting thing here is that it feels like a missed opportunity, this should be a groundbreaking, interesting film but instead the film makers have played it straight with a totally predictable plot, over the top special effects and an inconclusive “we could make another one, you know” ending which resolves nothing and leaves those who enjoyed the previous films feeling cheated.

On the positive side, the film still has some interesting philosophical ideas in it, all the bits with Hugo Weaving in are good and the fight at the end is nifty (if a little repetitive) especially the slo-mo close up of Reeves punching Weaving in the chops. This scene is played out against an eerily fascist world where Agent Smith has become everybody, very iconic. Also any film which burns the eyes off its hero half way through has to have something going for it.

Strangely I also feel like I want to watch it again, no idea why.