Did you hear that massive thud just now? That was the Matrix trilogy hitting a giant brick wall.

I don’t want to say that the latest the last installment, Revolutions, is bad, but I hear dentists recently rejected the idea of the movie playing in their waiting rooms because they felt it would drive away their patients.

Revolutions isn’t mind-numbingly awful, though. It’s a laugh riot. The trouble is, the Wachowski brothers (who cowrote and codirected) forgot to add any jokes.

When last we left our intrepid, patchwork band of rebels fighting those evil machines that run the Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) was somewhere between the machine world and the real world. Oh, and some guy who apparently was sent to kill him was in a coma.

Meanwhile, the machines are drilling down to the last outpost of real humanity, the deep-underground city known as Zion, where people have come from all cultures (and, judging from the look of their executive council, all hairstyles as well), people who simultaneously raise their hands either to express defiance or because they’re testing a new underarm deodorant. You know these people. They’re dirty and yet so pure.

It’s up to Neo, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to figure out how to stop the machines, who are led by Sentinels, mosquito-like drones that you just can’t swat. Aiding them in their quest is The Oracle, the mystical – if slightly dowdy – psychic played by Mary Alice. Like most of the people in the movie, The Oracle speaks in riddles. But don’t worry about understanding her cryptic responses – there’s killin’ to be done!

And what killing! One scene – the attack of Zion by the machines – takes forever. (I didn’t have a watch in the cold, cold theater, but I could have read it by the bright green EXIT sign behind me. A sign that, by the way, looked awfully inviting.) It seems like an entire hour of the two-hour movie is devoted to these things breaking through the outer hull of the underground city and kicking butt. The trouble is, the action moves soquick, it’s often tough for the normal human
eye to discern who is shooting at whom. It’s just madness, utter chaos without any sort of perspective. In short, it’s an absolute mess.

(One of the weapons the humans use in their defense are these giant Transformers-like robots into which the human straps himself – males only; sorry, ladies! – and maneuvers the arms to fire machine guns. But what’s the point? The humans themselves are completely vulnerable – they don’t even warrant a plastic shield!)

In this movie, we see a few familiar characters from the first two movies. There seems to be no need for them – except for The Oracle – other than to complicate the plot. Which is quite odd, because the entire plot itself takes only 30 minutes or so to play out – the rest is sound and fury.

Some of the dialog – no, make that most – is astoundingly poor. Take that lengthy battle scene, for instance. It’s as if the Wachowskis were channeling a screenwriter from old Republic Pictures, the low-budget outfit that produced scads of John Wayne war movies. Nearly every cliche shows up in this one, from the goofy young soldier who screws up but just somehow manages to help save the day to the two soldiers on the run from the machine, with one mowed down while the other just escapes. (I expected a “no.. go on.. beat those machines!” before the soldier died.)

Here’s how it breaks down, folks. The first Matrix was wonderful in its mysticism; it was more than bombs burstin’ in the air. It was philosophical and quite mysterious. The second one lost a bit of that but still tossed a few curveballs our way.
But the third one? Try no mysticism and some of the poorest action scenes in recorded history.

The Matrix: Revolutions: *1/2 (and barely)