2003, R, 129 minutes

The third installment of the ultra-popular Matrix trilogy has finally arrived and millions of fans are now sitting in their local movie theaters with the utmost confidence that this final (?) film in the franchise will leave them dazzled by its epic scope and completely satisfied with the wrap-up of their favorite movie series. Well, sorry for the buzzkill folks, but The Matrix Revolutions is some pretty bad moviemaking.

It’s a cliché for a critic to say “things start off good enough, but then…" -- well, luckily for me I don’t have to say it because Revolutions is nearly incoherent from the very beginning. As the movie starts, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is trapped in between the machine world and the Matrix with no hope of rescue (or explanation of how he got there or why he’s there in the first place), but Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Seraph, the Oracles bodyguard (Collin Chou) are trying to strike a deal with The Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) that would spring Neo from his cyber-purgatory and let him get on with his goal of Saving Zion, the last human city, which is going to be under Sentinal attack in less than twenty hours. Confused? Well sit tight, because it doesn’t get any less confusing from here.

Does Neo break out of this netherworld between reality and the computer world? Do the statements that the Architect made in the last movie about Zion being destroyed come true? Does Morpheus get to pontificate with more insanely over the top monologues? Well, I won’t ruin it for you, but by the end of the movie, I couldn’t care less about anything that happened on the screen, and I blame the Wachowski brothers for it. What took George Lucas roughly twenty years to screw up (his beloved Star Wars franchise), the brothers Wachowski have managed to do in four, and if I may paraphrase a line from the Architect at the end of Reloaded: they have become exceedingly efficient at it.

They’ve taken what was, at its core, a simple story of good versus evil and expanded it into it’s own universe, complete with political intrigue, odd looking characters, and supercool images, but in expanding the world of the Matrix, they lost sight of the one thing that made people love the series in the first place, and no amount of gee-whiz effects work or preachy dialogue can replace it: characters that we cared about and felt invested in. There is so much going on that the film never seems to have the time slow down to focus on any one person or group of people long enough to do more than get them involved in a fight. It’s lost the carefully balanced combination of heart and hi-tech effects that made the first film such a pleasure; Revolutions, despite all it’s quasi-spiritual dialogue and set pieces, is as cold and soulless as the machines that the humans in the film are trying to defeat.

Not only could you not care less about anyone in this film, the directors don’t help by setting up scenes with little or no explanation as to how the characters have arrived in them in the first place. Neo in the train station at the beginning is the perfect example of this. How did he get there? Well, something about him using his powers to stop the sentinels in the second movie…umm…okay, sure, it’s a stretch, but its sci-fi and you have to suspend some disbelief. The family at the train station that explains to Neo what the place actually represents; it’s a place between the Matrix and the machine world. Okay, but what is the point of bringing it up to our hero? Why does Neo need to be there in the first place? It does nothing to move the story along, and it never seems to come back into play in the storyline. The only thing this scene does is start the whole ball of confusion rolling. The questions keep piling up, but answers are never fully given, and there are numerous scenes like this one. By the end of it all, you don’t feel like you are getting the mindscrew that the first Matrix so effectively delivered, leaving you boggled at its superbly crafted story. You simply feel screwed.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have a few good points. The fight scenes are handled in spectacular fashion, especially the fight on the docks of Zion, where soldiers climb into massive robotic fighting machines to do battle with the hordes of nasty sentinels. It’s set near the middle of the movie, and it really helps to liven things up. Sentinels fly in unison like one big giant monster as bullets fly and Zionians die in amazingly lifelike detail. It is truly one of the best action sequences ever put into a movie; huge in scale and breathtaking in its vision. The only problem with this beautifully set up sequence is that there is no one in Zion that you actually care about doing any fighting, unless you happen to be a fan of The Kid from the second film (and I’m not). Neo is off trying to make a deal with the machine city that will lead to peace for the whole world, while Morpheus and the gang are trying to evade capture in the underground tunnels, leaving a couple of characters that are way too underdeveloped to bring any emotional impact to the devastation being brought down upon them.

The final showdown between Neo and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving, who seems to be truly enjoying his role) is fairly tasty as well, but as with the burly brawl in Reloaded, the payoff is rather lame, especially when you consider the trilogies entire storyline comes down to this final fight. The big showdown happens, it ends, and the audience sits and waits for some big payoff that never comes.

The only other bright spot in this wholly underwhelming adventure is Jada Pinkett Smith as Niobe, a hovercraft pilot with attitude and the skills to back it up. Although she was in the second film, she didn’t have much to do in it, but here she steals every scene. She plays it very serious, but unlike all the rest (save for Weaving) she doesn’t seem to be delivering her lines in a soupy haze of geeky dialogue. When she takes control of a hovercraft in order to race back to Zion in hopes of saving the city, you actually realize that you are enjoying a part of this movie without any qualms whatsoever. Too bad the rest of the movie is not up to the same caliber as her more than adequate job selling her character to the audience.

I would hope that some day this whole series gets a DVD release with commentary from the Wachowski brothers. After the first one I felt that they didn’t do interviews to discuss The Matrix because they were the type of filmmakers that want the film to speak for itself and let the audience decide what they will, and that is fine by me. But with the release of the last two films, and especially Revolutions, I wonder if they refuse to discuss the Matrix series because not even they could make sense out of anything that is going on in the films. Hopefully this is not the case, but shame on them anyway for expecting audiences to go along for the ride as they take a great stand alone film like The Matrix and fill it with so much insignificant mumbo-jumbo that the audience needs to go back to the first film just to get a refresher on why they are sitting in their seats for this bloated and tired third installment.