The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

Directed by Lana Wachowski. Starring Keanu Reeves, Jonathan Groff, Neil Patrick Harris, Carrie-Ann Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jada Pinkett Smith, Toby Onwumere, Max Riemely, Lambert Wilson, Telma Hopkins. [R]

Despite dying at the end of The Matrix Revolutions, Neo and Trinity are alive and well many years later (sixty years, in fact, as Jada Pinkett Smith’s bad old-age makeup attests), but they’re not Neo and Trinity anymore. He’s a video game developer using the old moniker of Thomas Anderson, and she’s Tiffany, a married mom who only sees Anderson during “random” encounters at a coffee shop. But then Morpheus (Abdul-Mateen II) and his red/blue pills show up, and they plunge into the rabbit hole for more screwy virtual reality hijinks; “hijinks” being the best way to embrace the material, since the script is such a muddle of transitional details, new (and poorly-explained) jargon and gimmicks, rewrites/retcons, and self-referential meta commentary, that it’s exhausting trying to keep up. That playful self-awareness (coming up just short of having actors turn to the camera and wink), looser performances, and the polished, versatile visuals are what make this fourth chapter an improvement over the saturnine tone and aesthetic that the previous sequels so often affected, although its pleasures tend to be ephemeral; even the action scenes, which have a lot of pizzazz and variability, don’t end up sticking to the ribs because the consequences are so hard to define. Lacking Laurence Fishburne in the Morpheus role isn’t as detrimental as one might expect—the character only gets a couple of juicy “exposition dumps” with his old protégé, and is rendered unimportant in the second half—but Hugo Weaving is sorely missed as the new-fangled Agent Smith (Groff’s declaration of “Mister Anderson” is pure understudy, and he seems to just straight up call him “Tom” more often). This marks the first film that writer/director Wachowski has made without sibling, Lilly. Christina Ricci makes a cameo appearance; Chad Stahelski, Reeves’ stunt double for the original film and director of the John Wick movies, appears as Tiffany’s husband.

62/100