113
by TC
I mean it’s really bad. They took the parts of 2 and 3 that made people hate them and made the entire film about that. So hey, if you really love the “real world” of the matrix, i guess this is for you? I don’t know who could possibly care about “hey look, it’s 85 year old naiobi!”, but i guess there’s an audience as i’ve heard people talk about how great this is. To me, as soon as the films introduced “the real world” underground society, that’s the moment it started sucking. The more time they spent there, the more it sucked, which is why 3 was total shit. At least 2 had that sick car chase scene. And now, here we are, however many years later, back in “the real world”, where only two main actors returned to reprise their roles. One of which, by the time i bailed, had been in the film for about 30 seconds. One of the other things that was great about the first one was the soundtrack. This doesn’t even have that. Seriously, by 90 min in, nothing happens. Nothing. “Lana” W clearly thinks very highly of themselves and their writing/dialog as that’s all we get here. Dive into the shit “real world” and have endless exposition, all set to soothing ambient sounds.
Right now, with four entries (not counting animatrix), this franchise is around 35% (giving part 2 10 points for the action sequences). If you graphed the quality of the franchise over time, it would be a graph of exponential decay. The only reason we’re talking about it was the first one was so fucking good. After that, oof. And this is peak shit. Even the nine main entries of the SW franchise, as much as quite a few of them are shit, ends up around 50% for me (where most have a binary score, but ep 1 gets points for a couple sequences and darth maul, and ROTJ gets points removed for the ewok subplot). Really, this film caused me to think about the idea of franchises in general (properties with more than three movies). Outside of and until the MCU, the only ones to do it mostly at least ok are horror films. I mean, you have your big three - F13, NOES, and Halloween. Of those, F13 is probably most consistent, with Halloween having more swings for the fences - some of them just don’t work well. But believe me, I am well aware horror doesn’t ALWAYS do it well. Tons of examples of films that didn’t need one sequel let alone ten. But i’d still rather sit through Amityville 5 than this huge, steaming pile of shit again.