A pair of evil albinos known as the Twins battle Morpheus. View Slideshow 
The original Matrix movie was more than just an action flick. Sure, the heroes' new-jack, frozen-time kung fu kicked ass, and the software villains were supremely menacing. But it was the searing social critique, the information-age theology, and the series of head-in-your-palms plot twists that catapulted the film to cult status.
The new Matrix movie is just an action flick.
By turning 1999 America into a computerized dream world, designed by evil machines to suppress the human race, The Matrix put in pictures what so many intuited: that this Bubble-era lifestyle was just a façade, and that the people who swayed to its corporate-worshipping rhythm were sleepwalking through some usurious fantasy.
The Matrix: Reloaded has almost none of that. And it lacks the messianic hero-is-born pulse that gave the first movie its mythic resonance.
Instead, in the second installment of the Matrix trilogy, we find that being the chosen one can be a drag.
(Warning: a few, small spoilers ahead.)
Neo (Keanu Reeves) may be the guy who can bend the computer fantasy world to his will, the man who can finally liberate flesh-and-blood people from their mechanical masters. But what he really wants to do -- and who can blame him? -- is get busy with his androgynously sexy martial arts partner, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss).
It's a difficult assignment, however. Neo's constantly besieged by sadhus, beggars and groupies looking for a piece of the messiah. That interferes greatly with the couple's few hours of private time in the last human city, Zion.
Almost as frustrating is the fact that Zion's military master, an unbeliever by the name of Lock (Harry Lennix), doesn't want to use Neo's powers to counter a massive assault on the city by a quarter-million squid-like sentinel robots.
But Neo finally gets his chance to save the human race, of course. He enters the computer-made alternate reality known as the Matrix -- and then the action takes off.
Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) -- the malevolent program who's the first movie's bad-guy-in-chief -- can now replicate himself, virus-like. And in a ghetto courtyard, with standard-issue superhero theme music blaring, Neo is forced to fight dozens and dozens of Smiths at once.
Despite what you may have read about the hyper-real special effects in this sequence, the brawl shows its computer-generated origins. It looks more like a high-end video game than a grandly cinematic kung fu battle. It'd be a blast to play, no doubt. But it isn't all that fun to watch.
The next big fight comes off much better. Set in the entranceway to a Versailles-like mansion, the elegant, slow-motion, mid-air clashes recall some of the great Hong Kong martial arts moments. Keanu is a gwailo Jet Li as he pirouettes in space, assaulting his foes with devastating kicks, quicksilver punches and ancient weapons of war. All that's missing is Li's signature, ground-parallel "no shadow kick" to finish the melee.
Then comes the big car-chase scene. It's the movie's best highlight, by far. Maybe other films have made motorcycles speeding against multilane traffic, fisticuffs atop crashing 18-wheelers and ruthless pursuit by evil albino twins more exciting. But I haven't seen them.
Keanu Reeves is also surprisingly enjoyable. Slack-jawed for long stretches of the first film, Reeves seems to have taken acting lessons, in addition to the martial arts training he underwent for this chapter.
But this positive is more than outweighed by some truly silly speeches from the usually stellar Lawrence Fishburne, who plays Neo's mentor, Morpheus -- and by a plot that serves only to bridge the movie's long-winded, high-fallutin' dialogues and martial arts sequences.
1999's Matrix fused its philosophy and fighting into a seamless union. The more Neo freed his mind -- the more he realized that the reality that he used to inhabit was just a mass of code -- the more spectacular his abilities in that world became. This powerful combination rocketed the movie forward, keeping audiences gripped until the fist-clenching climax, when Neo discovers he is the One.
2003's Matrix, on the other hand, plods to a strange, disconnected cadence. The heady chats break up the battles, draining much of their drama, rather than ratcheting up the momentum.
The movie compensates for this by adding more and more bad guys to the mix. But as Reloaded proves, more isn't necessarily better.
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