Credit the Wachowski brothers for one thing: While any other director would have felt the responsibility to end one of the most [financially] successful trilogies in cinema with an escalating bang, the Wachowskis were confident enough to go out with a mewling whimper. While any other directors would have been pressured to constantly raise the ante, to constantly push the bar, the Wachowskis were confident enough to end the Matrix movies with a conclusion that is less technically impressive than its predecessors in nearly every imaginable way.

Cinema history teaches us that there are many interesting ways for a franchise to self-implode by its third installment: Ewoks, Sofia Coppola, going back to the Old West, Joe Pesci, Tina Turner, 3-D, New Age blither blather, helping the Taliban fight the Russians, Richard Pryor.

The list goes on and on, but the things these mistakes have in common is that they were failed additions to a franchise. The third movie in the Matrix series, Matrix: Revolutions, fails because while many things were stripped away, nothing viable or sustainable has been added in its place. The result is like the qualitative equivalent of watching Sofia Coppola and a group of Ewoks discuss Karma in the middle of the O.K. Corral while wearing those annoying and ineffective 3-D glasses. That, however, at least sounds bizarrely amusing.

Remember how The Matrix came out and it was "the thinking man's action movie," a film that blended philosophy, visual poetry, science fiction and martial arts fusion? The Wachowski brothers spent around $300 million proving that that film's successful stew of elements was a fluke, making Matrix: Reloaded, a sequel which was merely thunderously disappointing. The series' final installment, though, could hardly be a disappointment (thank you, lowered expectations). It's just a thunderously bad movie.

The Matrix: Revolutions begins exactly where Reloaded left off, which will assume two things of casual viewers of that first film: That you remember where Reloaded left off and that you care.

Neo (Keanu Reeves) is stuck in some liminal space between the Matrix and the real world. In Matrix-speak, that should mean that he's in some fascinatingly "art-designed" space with a funky name. Instead, he's standing at an all-white subway stop. Goodness gracious! Did the Wachowskis run out of money? Or creativity? Didn't the first movie already have a set piece in a subway station? Hasn't the series already used public transportation as a metaphor for human life in transition? Several times? Not a fruitful start.

Back in some other frame of reference, the Zion-ites are trying to figure out if the unconscious Bane (Ian Bliss) is responsible for some unfortunate act of treachery at the end of the second movie. Um, dudes, everybody else in your little community has a funky and cool nickname and this guy is called "Bane." It doesn't take a genius to see that he might be trouble.

Also, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), who used to be an interesting character but now is just a love-lorn space-waster, has to go on a mission to try to help Neo. Accompanied by Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus (whose mystique is inversely proportional to the size of his love handles) and Collin Chau's Seraph. They visit a freaky bondage club (shot in the exact style of several other raves and club scenes in this series) to visit the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) and Persephone (Monica Bellucci, whose dialogue has been removed in favor of a higher profile for her cleavage). Dunno what they do there, but in order to get into the fetish club, they have a gun fight in the lobby which seems to be paying homage to the gun battle in the bank (or office) lobby in The Matrix. Boys, if you're paying homage to yourself after less than five years, you might have run out of ideas.

There's blabber with The Oracle (Mary Alice) and then, around the 30-minute mark, chaos erupts and the film devolves into the lengthy, intellectually bankrupt Battle for Zion.

The relief of the film's structure is that if you wait a week for the crowds to die down, you can just skip the first third of The Matrix: Revolutions. You can pay money to see another movie and then, afterwards, sneak into Revolutions a reel or two in and you won't miss anything except for the increasingly watered down and idiotically contradictory philosophy that once fueled the series. Here, it's entirely dead weight. By the end, all that you have to know is that even if things seem predetermined, there's still a measure of Free Will and that, more importantly, Neo is Jesus. Anything else is finally ballast.

The first 30 minutes of The Matrix: Revolutions are among the worst directed spools of celluloid I have ever seen. I will repeat that for all big fans of Larry and Andy Wachowski who will try to remind me that I really loved Bound and that I liked The Matrix an awful lot: The direction of the beginning of the movie is amateurish in a way the most elementary film school student would know to avoid.

The beginning of the movie is one scene of sub-par philosophy after another, which is to be expected. What isn't to be expected is that each scene is presented in exactly the same manner: Character A enters a room and addresses Character B. They talk to each other. They don't move around. There's no staging for effect. They don't offer performances. They just talk in stagnant monologues. The camera goes from medium shot on both people talking. It cuts to a close-up of Character A. Cuts to a close-up of Character B. Then cuts back to a medium shot of them talking. This is what happens in every conversation. The Wachowskis have no sense that actors can move within the frame or that four of five consecutive scenes of this nature are deadly for a film's pace. They just don't care.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: In the years between the completion of the first Matrix and the beginning of shooting on the second, the Wachowski brothers should have made a small, independent movie. They should have written and directed a genre piece about humans living in the real world so that they could remember the rudimentary aspects of their craft: The importance of being able to write dialogue. The importance of being able to shoot dialogue. The importance of creating character. The importance of creating plot.

The plot for The Matrix: Revolutions can be summed up in the tagline: Everything that has a beginning has an end. Notice that the tagline says nothing specific about the Matrix movies. It just gives the fortune cookie wisdom that if you start something, you should finish it. The point is that the movie wreaks of inevitability, rather than reason and of resignation, rather than a push forward. The Matrix trilogy reaches a conclusion here because the Wachowskis and producer Joel Silver announced that things would end after three movies, not because the plot progresses to the point at which it can go no further. Why are various things happening in the movie? To get closer to the magic words "The End." That's very different from things pushing forward to reach a satisfying ending.

Very little in the plot progresses from anything else. Both of the major set pieces end in very literal deus ex machina acts of convenience. Despite the fact that there are two major showdowns at the end of Revolutions, these are showdowns in which neither the heroes nor the villains enter the fray with an iota of strategy. For a film that includes any amount of fractal imagery, it almost makes sense that the various false conclusions are almost entirely random, hardly bound by logic or philosophy at all.

And the characters in The Matrix: Revolutions? Gone, entirely. Viewers unversed in the first two movies of the series will wonder how this band of dirty, somber ciphers have been entrusted with saving humanity. Viewers of the first two movies might just wonder what happened to everybody. Remember when Morpheus was wise and agile, when he possessed wisdom and could fight as well? All he does here is believes in Neo and yet the duo shares maybe 30 seconds of screen time. Trinity fights for a minute at the beginning and then becomes nothing more than a seeing-eye dog for Morpheus. Neo, so blessed with power in the last movie that he seemed blandly invincible goes to the opposite extreme here, even becoming an Oedipus figure for a while (allowing Keanu Reeves to achieve a level of acting that I would like to call "Shatner-esque"). Neo is such a non-factor for the majority of this movie that he's a secondary character until the finale.

As much as I disliked Reloaded, it followed in the footsteps by introducing a series of new and intriguing supporting characters with symbolic names like The Keymaker and Saraph and The Twins and The Architect and The Restroom Attendant. In Revolutions? Nothing. There's the snaggle-toothed Trainman, who is redundant at best. Returning characters like the aforementioned Merovigian and Persephone are gone after one scene. Two of the marginal characters from the second movie, Zee (Nona Gaye) and Kid (Clayton Watson) are accorded undeserved moments of semi-heroism, but not much more. Only Jada Pinkett Smith's Niobe benefits from increased screentime, or else she just seems more in command here than she did in the last movie.

So if The Matrix: Revolutions offers no new philosophy, no interesting plot twists and no memorable characters. Surely it offers no advances in special effects, new exciting machines and fabulous new fighting set pieces.

Nuh-uh.

What made the first Matrix movie so compelling was that it had a peculiar referentiality to the "real world" such as we understand it. The sucker punch was that while we thought we were living in reality, reality was actually a series of dark, machine-laden tunnels somewhere. The concept that the "real world" was actually the effect wasn't original, but it was fun. By Revolutions, the series has lost all connection to anything that's even remotely familiar as human or real (emotionally, physically, or in set design). The irony, though, is that while the filmmakers are supposedly depicting the REAL real world now, everything looks faker than ever. The actors aren't walking through cities masquerading as The Matrix, they're walking through soundstages with green-screen backdrops. There are also models and backdrops and all sorts of set design, but mostly it's computers.

John Gaeta remains as the visual effects supervisor, and he has become the star of the show. He has, however, become a star who isn't allowed to improvise. In the first film, the coolest machines we saw were the squid-like sentinels, but we only saw a handful. In the second film, the coolest machines we saw were, again, those squid-like sentinels, but at least we saw more of them. In the final movie, you'd think that the Wachowskis would want to offer something really nifty in addition to those squid-like sentinels, but that isn't the case. We just get more of them. Thousands and thousands of Computer Calamari. There are also giant drills, but they're not much by way of pay-off.

So instead of concentrating on new creatures, Gaeta must have at least been able to smoothly integrate the sets, computer animation and actors, right? Sometimes. But mostly not. In the battle scenes on the Zion dock, the different levels of effects are particularly obvious and poorly meshed. The computer backdrops remain mostly flat, a poor contrast to the people and sets, which have depth and texture (I'm speaking in terms of tactile presence, not in terms of character).

And the action scenes? Loud, epic and hollow. I'll discuss the two biggest in a little more detail (and after a spoiler warning), but I want to briefly wonder whatever happened to martial arts choreography master Yuen Woo-Ping? He's credited here, but I can't begin to figure out what he might have done. The wire-fu that seemed so fresh in the original movie is entirely gone. None of the action scenes require any of the actors to do anything at all. Reeves does a tiny bit of martial arts in his final battle, but otherwise it's just guns blazing and computer effects. In the original Matrix, the action scenes were based around a human element that is entirely gone. There are no protracted hand-to-hand fights, nor weapon-based fights that require any of the actors to actually do anything.

***SPOILER WARNING: I'm gonna talk about the film's two major action scenes now. Just a bit, to explain why they annoyed me. I won't give away any surprises about how the scenes resolve, but if you wish to go into the movie entirely fresh, skip ahead***

The first big action scene is one that I like to call the Attack of the Wacky Wall-Walkers. Folks of my generation may recall wacky wall-walkers as the squishy, sticky octopi that you'd throw against a wall and then they'd lurch and slide down. The giant squid-like sentinels in the Matrix movies are nothing more than wacky wall-walkers. So in any case, they finally get through and attack Zion and the result is loud and intense. There's no doubt that the Attack of the Wacky Wall-Walkers packs a punch. But I guess my question is: What was the strategy at work for either party? Thousands upon thousands of sentinels swarm into the dock area and what do they do? They fly around in large packs making shapes. The humans are attacking them with a cheesy variation on the lifting robots from Aliens, but do the sentinels use their superior numbers to just swarm the men in the robot suits? No. They form columns and fly directly at them, into the line of fire. Stupid robots.

Stupid humans, as well, because I've gotta say that the rousing battle speech from Nathaniel Lees' Mifune is the worst variation on Henry the 5th's St. Crispin's Day speech I've ever seen in the movies (and that includes the speech given by President Bill Pullman in Independence Day).

Also, have the Wachowskis heard of crosscutting? There's no excuse for the half-hour of screentime where Neo and Trinity vanish entirely.

When they return, they're on route to the machine city, which apparently nobody has ever gotten within 100 kilometers of or something. OK. The guards for the Machine City are sentinels that appear to only fly horizontally and the city is protected by shooting machines that appear to only shoot horizontally. And nobody ever thought to fly over these obstacles before? Pathetic.

In any case, the film creeps to the showdown between Neo and Hugo Weaving's over-acting Agent Smith. There are thousands upon thousands of Agent Smiths, but all but one of the clones are just spectators for some reason. Smith and Neo fight in what can only be described as an overpriced rip-off of the climactic battle between Superman and General Zod in Superman 2. It's two near-immortals throwing each other around. The only difference is that Terence Stamp and Christopher Reeve were "actually" fighting in Superman 2, so Revolutions really just concludes with a skirmish between two sets of computer pixels. And what's the point of Agent Smith being able to replicate himself if none of the clones think to step in and help out once the fight becomes a little bit competitive. There's no excuse for them to stand on the sidelines as if ganging up on Neo would be some sort of affront on fair play.

****Spoilers over. Review? Nearly over. I promise.****

I've got to confess, I have no understanding at all of how Revolutions ends and whether or not I'm supposed to care. Yes, I watched until the last credit rolled across the screen, but I don't know if it's a happy ending, a sad ending, or just a boring and unsatisfying ending.

At the end of the day, that's all the movie promised: Everything that has a beginning has an end. They never said that everything that has a beginning has a good end.

This is a one-star disaster and the two sequels this year have pretty well desecrated my memories of the original Matrix. What a disaster.

[Oh. Sorry. Me again. Is anybody else offended and perplexed by what happened with The Oracle? Gloria Foster died after shooting her scenes from the first film, so she was replaced by Mary Alice and mention is made to the fact that the Oracle had to change her shell. Is there some sort of rule that the Oracle has to be a sassy older black woman? By just replacing actresses are the filmmakers saying that basically all older black women are interchangeable? It sure feels that way. Particularly since it's just plain stupid to make a big deal about the Oracle needing to change her shell to hide and then having her hide in a shell which, let's face it, is very similar to her previous appearance. Blah. Whatever.]



Recommended: No