The Matrix Resurrections, review: a boring, self-regarding rehash

In 1999, The Matrix was certainly something new – the state-of-the-art, science fiction head-trip which launched a thousand undergrad theses. The part everyone remembers is Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) twigging his whole life was a simulation, by popping a red pill that showed him the truth: machines had all of humanity hooked up and enslaved as drones.

A rabid fanbase was triggered, then divided by two overblown sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions (both 2003), which span off into waffle and CGI excess, abandoning the catchy premise and noirish cool which appealed in the first place. Nostalgia for that Matrix buzz is so prevalent that tempting us back for a fourth one isn’t the hard part, even if the (now trans) directing team has been halved, and only Lana Wachowski, without her sister Lilly, has taken charge.

Trailers made The Matrix Resurrections look like a blast, because two-and-a-half minutes of flashy bait was easy to come by. Alas, at 60 times that length, the head-rush of excitement is diluted into a dull throb.

First, we reset: Reeves’s Anderson starts looking bored at a desk yet again. Much older, he’s a game designer whose memory has been tampered with and who thinks he is the author of a best-selling video game trilogy called, guess what, The Matrix.

The pressure to outdo these games is gruelling, but then so is the overall meta-ness of this script, co-written by David (Cloud Atlas) Mitchell. “Our beloved parent company Warner Brothers wants a sequel,” instructs Keanu’s boss (Jonathan Groff), who steps into the shoes of the original besuited baddie, Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith.

So, we plunge right back behind the curtain, into machine world, where Anderson’s true form of Neo is tethered in a gooey slumber pod. His old ally, the sage-guru Morpheus (originally played by Laurence Fishburne), has taken a new form (Candyman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen). But Carrie-Anne Moss still plays cyberpunk heroine Trinity, who now thinks she’s a married mum called Tiffany in the world upstairs. Neo must wake her up to join the fight.

What are they fighting? This was never a Matrix strong point – an army of tentacled machines, a swarm of Weavings, anything the effects team had to fling out. The spurts of action here are disappointing, and get worse when Neil Patrick Harris (not good as a malign shrink) strolls around pontificating while bullets slow to a crawl.

If there is a strong point, it’s the chemistry between Reeves and Moss, looking beautifully bewildered by a destiny they can only half-remember. Moss, who has far less to do, makes the most of it; but Reeves has a lot more nonsense to wade through, and can’t spin a thousand variations on “confused”. He mainly stands around while Morpheus, along with a blue-haired hacker called Bugs (a capable Jessica Henwick) and Jada Pinkett Smith’s crinkly Resistance chief chew his ear off about all the usual free-will-vs-fate baloney.

The big problem with Resurrections is momentum, but what kills charm to boot is how much PR it keeps trying to do for the franchise. “I always loved that line” and “reboots sell” are both too self-regarding and smarmy by half. A reference to an “exomorphic particle codex” is ludicrous jargon, desperately inflating the IQ of a must-sound-clever screenplay.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

Dir: Lana Wachowski; Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Neil Patrick Harris, Jessica Henwick, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jada Pinkett Smith, Christina Ricci, Lambert Wilson. 15 cert, 148 min