DIRECTOR: Lana Wachowski

CAST: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Jonathan Groff, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett-Smith

REVIEW:

More than a few franchises have overstayed their welcome—Alien, Predator, Terminator—and The Matrix arguably never needed sequels to begin with. The 1999 original movie, while a bit style over substance (though it wasn’t devoid of the latter) and not having aged well in a couple aspects (its overinflated sense of its own leather jacket-clad, sunglasses-wearing coolness included), was a kinetic and hyper-stylized blast. Alas, its lackluster sequels, 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, fell victim to Pirates of the Caribbean Sequel Syndrome, following up a comparatively simple and straightforward original with overly padded sequels getting bogged down in labored convoluted “epic” mythology and taking themselves way too seriously. And now, almost twenty years later, Lana Wachowski (no longer co-directing with her sibling Lily) has brought us The Matrix Resurrections, a movie way past its sell-by date. An uninspired, messy, and often incoherent hodgepodge, undeservedly self-satisfied with its own copious and heavy-handed meta self-referencing, Resurrections is a turgid slog, a movie that’s not only hard to follow, but doesn’t make us care enough to bother. If this was the best the still-involved Wachowski sibling could come up with after almost two decades of developing a continuing story, The Matrix should have stayed dead.