Things That Kicked Ass
1. The highway chase scene. Worth the price of admission by itself.
2. Harold Perrineau. It's good seeing Augustus Hill walking again.
3. Hell yeah, the Neo v. 100 Smiths fight is a good one. Better, though, is the weapons-laden fight that seems to have been set in the villa where Nomi Malone had her opening night party.
4. The notion that Neo's existence is a built-in part of the matrix meant as a mechanism of control. Kewl.
5. The albino twins with the dreadlocks.
6. Cornel West. You can never have enough Princeton professors in movies, and I hope this opens the door for Peter Singer to get his shot in the next Adam Sandler film.
7. Again, that highway chase. Whoa.
8. The sentinels are appropriately creepy.
Things Which Sucked Ass:
1. Shut the f*ck up, Merovingian. Seriously, you ponderous French motherf*cker. Not one word in those scenes was necessary to the plot.
2. Shut the f*ck up, Jimmy Exposition. This whiny little sh*t almost ruined the first half-hour of the movie single-handed.
3. Shut the f*ck up, Commander Lock. We know there has to be Someone In Zion Who Thinks Morpheus Is Going Too Far, but why did he have to be such a douchebag?
4. Shut the f*ck up, Old Councillor Guy Who Complains That He Doesn't Understand How Machines Work. You should've been Brian Dennehy, and then I'd have cared.
5. Shut the f*ck up, Architect. No action movie should have the words 'ergo' or 'concordantly'. I heard more coherent philosophy from Bodhi in Point Break.
6. Seriously, did George Lucas write half of this? With all this crap, I was waiting for the discussion of the trade situation on Naboo. Nobody cares about intra-Zion tussling; we just wanted to see some serious ass-kicking with some half-decent philosophy behind it. No more Paduan learning!
7. That half-assed rave scene. Where was the dude with the Cat-in-the-Hat hat?
8. My increasing fears that this was going to become just another Magical Negro movie, with Morpheus and the Oracle and Link just dispensing wisdom to Neo and Trinity, and only the white people being allowed to kick ass. But in the last twenty minutes, Morpheus gets his share of Serious Ass To Kick, and it's worth it. Still, the movie comes really close to uncomfortably trading off notions of black=authentic spirituality as a cultural shorthand, and I don't quite know how to draw the line between laudably diverse casting and unacceptable, though benignly-intended stereotyping.
9. If you're designing the matrix (I'm talking both vis-a-vis the architect within the movie and re: the Wachowskis), and you want to make it enticing, why's everyone driving Cadillacs? Wouldn't an attractive fantasyland designed to keep humans satiated include a few BMWs?
10. Not enough Cornel West. And that's what's really jarring: how can you have a movie that's too ponderous yet doesn't have enough Cornel West? I guess this is how.
The Wachowski brothers seem to have become too convinced of their own brilliance, and this movie needed an editor -- or, at least, someone to say no to them every once in a while. This movie could've been a half-hour shorter without harming the narrative.
That said, bring on Revolutions -- just, maybe, release it as a silent film?
edited Tuesday morning: in the interests of allowing people who view this site behind profanity filters at work, I have carefully replaced a lot of u's with *'s in certain four- and twelve-letter words. It's crafty.
