Reload

Well, I've no doubt I'm not the first person to say this (I've been avoiding the reviews) but The Matrix Reloaded is rubbish. Two-and-a-half hours of the filmmakers disappearing up their own arses. If they'd had an even vaguely competent editor they could have excised the excesses of the monstrously tedious and overlong scenes - the dancing one, or the incredibly useless waffling off-the-shelf French baddie being particular low points - and made things both more entertaining and more enigmatic. One of the geeky attractions of the first film was the huge number of cultural references dotted around the place, but half the attraction was their being alluded to rather being made the subject of a really quite tedious five-minute monologue. The "councillor" scenes had a suspiciously strong whiff of The Phantom Menace about them (although I'll concede this is probably unavoidable) and at least three characters could have been ditched without any consequence at all.

Even the fight scenes were too long, for God's sake.

In conclusion: unimpressed. In absolute abstraction it might be a vaguely OK sci-fi ninja flick, but compared to the precision of the first on it's just terrible.