'Matrix Revolutions': A couple turns too many on a good idea

I like to think of "The Matrix" as "the little action movie that could." Of course, there's nothing little about it now, but back when it first came out, it took two sad-sack genres that had seen better days -- action and sci-fi movies -- and said, "You can entertain with head-twisting ideas and skull-splitting action!"

It was an action movie that wanted more than the action movie's usual lot in life, and that alone suggested better futures, better alternate tomorrows.

But it went astray at some point, and we ended up with the cold, emotionally impenetrable mess that is "Matrix Revolutions." It appears now that part of what was great about "The Matrix" was what was left out -- a suggestion of infinite possibilities in the "real" and online worlds and spaces in between -- but only a suggestion. Leaving the mapping of this world to the imaginations of the audience was a masterstroke.

Explaining the expanding mythos down to its minutest detail in "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" was the story's undoing. Some stories need more time to be told than the rather arbitrary timeframe of one feature-length film. "The Matrix" is not one of them.

"Matrix Revolutions" begins slowly with the last human city deep underneath the earth bracing for the Machines' attack, and Neo (Keanu Reeves) -- the One whom a few humans believe is the messiah who can defeat the Machines -- is comatose. Morpheus and Trinity must rescue his mind from an in-between-worlds train station, through the intervention of the treacherous Merovingian.

It's never been a simple fight between good humans and evil machines, which is to the series' credit. The humans have contradictory motives, and the machines have unwittingly created a monster that threatens even them: Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). He's a brilliant program who can replicate himself seemingly infinitely in the Matrix -- the online world, which for most of humanity appears to be reality. Smith has a dry, smirking sense of humor, which sets his scenes apart from the leaden, portentious exchanges by everyone else. Although there are literally thousands of Agent Smiths, the movie really could use more of him.

Yet again, there's one amazing 20-minute, eyeball-filling fight scene that ups the ante for fight scenes everywhere. It's a seamless blend of live-action and computer animation on a massive scale, depicting the final battle for the city of Zion. The humans make their stand strapped into giant exoskeletons festooned with cannons. The Machines penetrate the walls of the citadel with monstrous drills, clearing the way for swarms of tentacled Sentinels, which look like giant spiders and swarm like killer bees.

But other problems that showed up in "Reloaded" persist. Neo's terrifying revelation -- waking up to find that the world he's lived in all his life is a computer program -- is well in the past now, and further reality-blurring shocks just don't hit the right notes of techno-paranoia like the first one.

Attempts to map out the personal lives of minor characters seem like dead ends, instead of elements essential to the story. And the existential questions that the series attempts to raise -- about choosing to define the nature of one's own existence -- seem like pop philosophy without much pop this time around.

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Movie Details

'Matrix Revolutions'

Directors: Andy and Larry Wachowski

Stars: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne

MPAA rating: R, for violence