The Matrix Resurrections

 

Once more unto the breach: Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix Resurrections

The feeble commercial and critical response to Lana Wachowski's The Matrix Resurrections gave me very low expectations for this, the fourth film in the series. Director Wachowski was in dire need of a hit and Mr. Reeves has found renewed success in grizzled action roles, so this seemed like it was going to be a mere cash-in; The Matrix regurgitations. 

I was certainly not bowled over by the film. The exposition scenes are tedious with Jada Pinkett-Smith trying to scowl under layers of latex. The action is largely rote. This bloated white elephant of a movie runs almost two and a half hours when it should have been 100 minutes. Still, compared to the previous sequels, I thought the movie had a pulse.

Lawrence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving are MIA, visible only in flashbacks. Perhaps the filmmakers didn't want the sexagenarians to look ridiculous in the action sequences or it was a way to cut costs. Regardless, Wachowski mostly succeeds with the young additions to the saga. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jessica Henwick both seem promising. The presence of David Mitchell on the screenwriting team also helps.

What was most heartening to me is that Wachowski seems more personally invested in the material than in the previous sequels. The tyranny of binary choices and the ambivalent impact of the world wide web (or matrix) are, at least, grown-up themes that they attempt to grapple with here. I wouldn't call myself a Wachowski partisan, but in their best films (Bound, The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, and this one), a genuine artistic personality with recurrent themes has emerged.