While watching The Matrix, I noticed that the audience burst into laughter at a few inopportune times, but that was mostly because of Keanu Reeves’s well-known deadpan delivery of a few key lines. I snickered too. In The Matrix Revolutions -- the final installment of this worn-out trilogy -- the audience had far more to laugh about than Reeves’s stilted line readings. Revolutions should have gone out with a bang; instead, it goes down in flames to giggles, groans, and rolling eyes, as audience members sit slack-jawed, wondering where the first movie’s intrigue has gone. It’s easily one of the worst movies of 2003.

The Matrix’s premise was one of the best "what ifs" we’ve seen in movies in years: What would you do if you found out that everything you thought was real was really just a complex illusion in your mind? In The Matrix, machines were keeping humans alive for the energy they provided, and kept them content by preoccupying their minds with an elaborate reconstruction of a world that looked like, well, Sydney, Australia in about the year 2000. This elaborate computer simulation was known as the Matrix, and humans were simply plugged into it. At the beginning of The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) was just another bored computer geek who was slowly realizing that the world he lived in wasn’t quite right. With the help of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo escaped that artificial world to learn that his destiny was far more than simply awaking from his trance-like state: He was The One who would help save others from their mental slavery.

Farfetched? Yes, but the writer-director team of Andy and Larry Wachowski sprinkled it all with pseudo-biblical references, dressed the heroes in cool clothes, played butt-kicking music, and shot it all with such panache that audiences gobbled it up. In a year when George Lucas’s The Phantom Menace was getting all the press, The Matrix was the coolest thing around. Almost everyone walked out of the theater, looked around, and wondered, What if . . . ?

The Wachowskis seem to have forgotten what that original movie was about, and have grown their original concept into a hodgepodge of a trilogy that has lost its way. We all went to the second film, The Matrix Reloaded, with great wonder about how Neo would save the rest of humanity, still plugged in to the Matrix, from their humdrum, vegetative lives. But instead of further exploring the concept of real and artificial worlds and telling us more about the Matrix itself, the second film served only to introduce us to a multitude of characters that no one without a notebook and pen could keep track of. The third film, The Matrix Revolutions, arms those characters with some of the corniest dialogue we’ve heard since Kevin Costner’s The Postman, and pits them in a monstrous battle against the machines. Neo has been elevated to Christ-like status, and does what he needs to do because he simply knows. It’s a cop-out by the Wachowskis, who can thus have Neo doing things that make no sense whatsoever and never have to explain it.

There’s nothing left to explore or discover in The Matrix Revolutions. The story is marginally more cohesive than that of Reloaded -- but only because Revolutions legitimately ends, whereas Reloaded simply stopped, as if the editors said "time out," snipped the film, and spliced in the closing credits. Everything that made The Matrix great was sidelined in Reloaded and is entirely absent from Revolutions -- as if someone had hit the Delete key. Well, I wish I had an Undo button that would make these two sequels vanish. The Matrix had a great idea that found its way into quite a spectacular film. It should have been left alone.

• Go Back