As one of the few people who didn’t feel completely let down by its predecessor, “The Matrix Reloaded,” my hopes for this third installment were nevertheless somewhat modest: I was looking for narrative coherence with a retroactivity clause, a movie that held itself together enough to shed some light on the tricky psycho-babble of the second installment. Fat chance. If anything, this outing makes its predecessor seem even worse, which, in its own perverse way, is quite a trick.
If there is anything remotely redeeming about this movie, it might be the climactic fight scene between Neo and Agent Smith, which is staged high above a nameless city, and which brings to vivid life the kind of airborne combat once resigned only to comic book panels. Here’s where the Wachowski Brothers finally deliver a little bit of that ol’ Matrix magic; this scene is truly something we haven’t seen before, at least not performed by human actors (and it makes somewhat tantalizing the possibility of applying such effects to a new “Superman” movie).
But its effect is brief and insufficient, and its merits are predominately physical, where half of this franchise’s promise has always been in mind-bending quasi-theologies, that willingness to breach and fuse philosophies that pervaded much of “Reloaded.” There is in fact evidence of some kind of clumsy braininess at work here: the script is flooded with constant allusions to a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a riddle, but it is so dense and without purpose that it might be appropriate both in terms of its density and its subject matter to say that it’s been encrypted — whatever truths the directors are playing with here are so convoluted and arbitrary that it’s simply not worth trying to dig for their meanings. In fact, you can say that about the whole affair: it’s simply not worth it.
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