Spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
After Reloaded, I couldn't help but like Revolutions... You know, "like" might be too strong of a word... "not hate," is closer, I think. The second movie bored me to tears until the last half an hour or so when things actually started to happen. The third movie on the other hand left me wondering what the fuck was going.
At first I was just entertained. This movie, unlike Reloaded didn't open with a 12-minute special effects extravaganza that was 10 minutes too long. It just started telling me a story. That made me happy. Some shit starts happening and The French Guy With the Unpronounceable Name demands that Trinity, Morpheus and Seraph bring him the Oracle's eyes in exchange for a favor. This demand is neatly sidestepped with the cunning use of big, fuck-off guns. I'm fine with that, really... but what's the significance of the Oracle's eyes? What’s that mean? Why is it a big deal? I don’t know, because it was never explained. And I don’t mean it wasn’t adequately explained, I mean that they didn't even bother to try explaining. They just dropped it and moved on.
And the movie continues like that, throwing underdeveloped story lines and characters at us, telling us they're important and then not telling us why. Link's girlfriend (fiance? wife?) steps in and does her part in the infantry. We know the character fairly well, and we care whether or not she lives or dies. Later we are introduced to her gunning partner... no, wait... "introduced" suggests that we were given any fucking clue who she was--and we really weren't. She seemed like an interesting character, with a lot of potential. When she died, I really, really wanted to care. But I just couldn't. Who was she? What was her relationship with the other characters? What was her name--did they even say? She was probably the least developed of these sorts of characters, but there were plenty of others who were nearly as bad.
The fight scenes (which is really one of the things the Matrix series is famous for) were highly entertaining. The battle at Xion, by far the worst fight in the movie, went on for far too long, and was all guns and explosions, not the cgi enhanced martial arts The Matrix and Matrix: Reloaded delivered in the past. Otherwise, I was fairly content with the fighting in this movie. They revisited old favorites but didn't dwell on them overly much. The final fight between Neo and Agent Smith was almost entirely cgi, but I was okay with that, since at this point we're talking about two super-beings locked in mortal combat--why shouldn't they fly about? I will admit that the final fight was rather anti-climactic, but it was all good up until then.
Ultimately, my major problem with this movie, as with Reloaded, was pacing. Where Reloaded wasted two hours of my life and then gave me thirty minutes worth watching, Revolutions gave me four or five hours of material crammed into just over two hours of film. I think the potential for a great trilogy was there, but they needed to cut the extraneous bull shit from Reloaded and expand on the could-have-been-interesting stories and characters from Revolutions
Boy meets girl. Boy gets bitten by werewolf. Girl turns out to be a Vampire, sworn to slay his kind. Boy and girl fall in love anyway. A classic story with a fantasy/horror twist. It was a good story. And there was an interesting "the bad guy's really the good guy, and vice versa" sort of twist near the end. Otherwise the movie was seriously, seriously lacking. The acting was down-right painful to watch, the leads had absolutely zero chemistry together, and the one decent actor in the movie couldn't save himself from all the bad writing.
In fact, Michael Sheen, the afore mentioned lone actor, was given a death scene frightfully reminiscent of Paul Reubens's in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That is to say, comically drawn out. Unfortunately for Sheen, he was meant to deliver meaningful, dramatic dialogue while on his deathbed. That's hard to pull off when your character should have died twenty minutes earlier.
The movie begins with a shoot-out between the Vampires and the Lychans, and even while watching I thought to myself, "Hey, action sequence to draw in the audience. Obvious, but not a bad idea." The problem with this sequence was its length. After what seemed like eons of shooting and running and hitting and shooting, I just wanted them to get on with the plot. I knew who I was supposed to be rooting for, based on commercials, but otherwise, I had absolutely no investment in the characters. I really didn't care if Vinyl-wearing Vamp Chick was killed or not.
Finally they did move on, and Vinyl Vamp Chick returns to the nest of vampires. As she walks through the mansion, nobody moves, except possibly to note her passing with a glance in her direction. Eyes Wide Shut anyone? The directing was mediocre; uninventive and unoriginal, but at least the unexperienced Len Wiseman knew to imitate the best. His most notable rip-offs were, of course, Kubrick and Proyas (The Crow, Dark City, etc).
Finally Vinyl Vamp Chick reaches her destination: cue The Worst Actor Ever. The acting was bad up until this point, but Brolly sucked so hard that even his costars minimal talent went down exponentially.
Then there was a lot of suckage, and even a little blowing. Let's skip to the end of the movie, yes?
Eventually, Leading Man Lychan gets turned into some sort of super-being, Lychan-Vampire hybrid. I assure you, it was much less exciting than it sounds. In any case, the makeup they did on this boy made him look like the bastard child of the Hulk and Nightcrawler. Blue-green skin, celerity (er, I mean "really fast movi-ness") reminiscent of Nightcrawler's mutant ability, big, bulging muscles like the Hulk, and animal-like nails and teeth (Marvel's suing next).
Ultimately, this would have been an excellent book or even, dare I say it, a really great role playing game. Books are never plagued by bad acting, directing and special effects. The characters that we should have cared about, but didn't (which is to say, all the characters) could have been more fully developed and explored.
PS--
This movie sucked moldy ass.
American Pie, and American Pie 2 are probably my two favorite movies for umcomfortable humor--you know, the kind of funny that makes you squirm in discomfort and embarrassment, on behalf of the characters. American Wedding, the third in the series, had pleny of uncomfortable humor... and very little else.
The characters were off. They had been so consistently written in the first two movies that even a small departure from their character was incredibly noticable. The writing for the characters got considerably better as the movie progressed, but the joke set-ups became more contrived and more obvious.
The movie isn't a complete loss. Although the set up for the jokes was forced, the jokes were no less funny for it. The characters become more themselves after the first twenty or thirty minutes, and thus more enjoyable to watch. Also, with Shannon Elizabeth no longer in the cast, there's no one whose performance made me wince. In fact, I stand by my statement that Alyson Hannigan (yum), Eddie Kaye Thomas (double yum), Jason Biggs and, of course, Eugene Levy are all wonderful actors.
I'd like to thank, in part, a total lack of hype for my complete and utter love of this movie. I went to go see it because I was working a ren. faire with my sister, and she and her friends wanted to go. I don't think I'd seen more than a single bus add for the movie, and that only because it was pointed out to me. I was completely without expectations, good or bad.
The story is well paced, and I was never once left bored. The special effects were excellent and used to enhance, not replace the tightly-knit story line. The swordplay was well choreographed, exciting, and when they used stunt doubles they were well-enough matched to the actors that I honestly, have no idea if they used stunt doubles...
Okay, I do, but only because I watched the credits all five times I went to see the movie. I did this because I was there with someone each time, and had to sit around to watch the not-worth-sitting-through-ten-minutes-of-credits stinger. Speaking of the stinger, let me save you all the trouble and put my one and only spoiler into this review: the monkey takes a piece of gold out of the chest. Like I said, so not worth the ten minutes of credits.
If you're only now going to go see this movie, keep an eye out for references to the ride. They're in there, or so I'm told. If you remember the ride, they're blatantly obvious, but I was so underwhelmed by the ride that I really don't recall any of it, so am relying on information from others here. There are also a few continuity errors in the movie, but nothing that I caught on my first couple of viewings. If you've already seen the movie, feel free to contact me about the errors, but I'm not going to put a damper on things for anyone who hasn't already seen it.
Now, a few last, squeeling fan-girl things I need to add before ending what has thus-far largely passed for an unbiased review. One, Orlando Bloom, although he has very pretty puppy dog eyes, and is one of the stars of PotC, my new favorite movie, is still, nonetheless, greasy. Rinse, lather and repeat, my friend. Rinse, lather and repeat. Two, Johnny Depp in eyeliner is quite possibley the sexiest thing anyone has bothered to film in a long time. I want to lick Captain Jack Sparrow.
That is all.
Warning - mild-to-spicy spoilers.
The Matrix is back. And not really much the same...
Laurence Fishburne's character Morpheus has suddenly become a saintly rabble-rouser, spouting off the prophesy like never before. This seems out of place, even startling, since Morpheus' sudden emphasis is both passionate... and really boring. He makes a "We Shall Overcome" speech before hundreds of wide-eyed citizens of the hidden world of Zion, but it comes off less inspirational, and more ego-driven. There's rarely a moment where when Morpheus doesn't seem to be saying "The prophesy is right, because I say it's right." When did Morpheus get so self-righteous? And how can we stop him?
Keanu Reeves (Neo), while more comfortable with dialogue with this film, isn't given a great number of great lines (or even as memorable as "I know Kung Fu" or "Woah" from the original), but his fight scenes -- which Neo performs in with alternating graces and guts -- are tremendous. Both the better-than-an-action-flick dialogue (particularly between Neo and the Oracle - more on her later) and action moments are well filmed.
The fight scenes are intercut with an otherwise philosophical storyline, along the lines of "why are we here?" Our answers to this question are vague; but that's understandable: there's a third movie left.
The action scenes are more elaborate then before, and bigger than ever. For this entry, Neo gets to take on a mysterious Kung Fu master, several Smiths (a now-former agent) at one time [amazing], and even fly [a little too often]. During the course of a particularly gripping extended scene on a freeway, Morpheus gets do his best samurai impression. Huzzah for his no-talking scenes; they're really his only major problem... That and the arrogance that seeps from his pores.
Longtime fave Trinity gets the opening sequence yet again -- twice, in fact, since that's a flash-forward of sorts. Carrie-Anne Moss is as lithe as ever, looking sleek and bold in vinyl within the fake world; and earthy and natural in tank tops and cargo pants, for Zion scenes.
As for new players, we get several: there's the ghosty twin brothers who prove difficult for Morpheus and Trinity over the course of several scenes - including the aforementioned freeway extravaganza; the Merovingian who has a role all but blatantly told to you being a counterpart to Greek mythology's Hades; and his charming and deceitful (at least to him) wife Persephone.
We don't get to see enough to Persephone to make a full characterization on her. All we know is that she has an irritating accent, forced dialogue, inexplicably casual hand-movements while shooting someone, and wears skin-tight pretty confidently for someone so clearly exposed in certain light. If we are to see more of her, perhaps we'll understand more of her motivation for pretty much anything. Or maybe we'll go looking for a blunt object to otherwise soothe us.
Also for the ride is Jada Pinkett Smith, reportedly taking over the role of Nyobi for Aaliyah, who died during filming. Niobe doesn't have much to do yet (she gets a fleeting moment to kick someone in the head), but Pinkett Smith has already proven that she's a far better actor than her husband, Will. Mostly a text-driven character (hey, there had to be at least one, right?), Niobe is strong-willed and fierce thus far. Still, don't place your hopes too high; the film-maker's keep showing shots of her and Morpheus making goo-goo-eyes at one another. Don't do it, Niobe -- you can do so much better! Find yourself another Man in Black! Like... Tommy Lee Jones...
The stand-out of the film is the returning Oracle, played to perfection by the now-deceased Gloria Foster. Her "little chat" with Neo is one of the best scenes, non-blood-splattering or otherwise. With clever phrasing, humour, and delicacy, the Oracle is a fascinating little chip in this big computerized fantasy. Cheers also to Harold Perrineau, who plays Link, Morpheus' right-hand man and operator on the ship Nebuchadnezzar.
The sequel as a whole is decent; it does not surpass the original in terms of storyline or message, although "Reloaded" does have more energy. Still, there are far too many distractions in "Reloaded"; one of the most eye-rolling being the Funktastic Rave Orgy (TM) in the first third of the film.
For some reason, to show their fearlessness, the citizens of Zion strip to nipple-bearing garb and dance to sweaty, if admittedly funky, drum beats. Between shots of frenzied, slow-motion grooving is a forced sex scene between Neo and Trinity that should have been cut, but is arguably important to a scene that follows immediately after. This is debatable; the poignancy of the second scene comes in Neo's afterglow, not in the orgasm. What may be most disturbing is the likelihood of future DVD releases showing how the scene was actually much, much longer.
And what of part 3? It comes out this fall, and from the complicated trailer that follows chapter 2's credits, it looks like it will be suitably bumpy and mind-bending... Just no more dancing, please? And someone gag Morpheus.