jimbofletch

Oh my gawd, this film's awful. The performances are wooden, the special effects are lousy, the dialogue is clunky and the story's preposterous.

Yet, this film is exceptionally entertaining! Come on, it's got Governor Arnold trying to act drunk, Grace Jones (terrifying) the tallest man ever (Bombatta), the Scrolls of Skelas, some priceless lines and plenty of action. It's loads better than the po-faced Conan the Barbarian, at least this one knows its garbage and just gets on with it.

The promise I was kingdomed? Come on, it's GENIUS!

I'd never heard of this until a few weeks back. I saw it last week on video. What a lovely film. It treats its subject matter with real sensitivity. The performances are believable, especially by the two Polish brothers (who made the film as well)as Siamese twins who have shacked up in a hotel for reasons initially unknown, while Michele Hicks is really sweet as the only person who will befriend them. The mood and pace is slow and beautifully graceful. A nice change from shallow, dumb blockbusters, Twin Falls Idaho is a very touching, tender film.

Wow, this is not a good film: to be honest, i don't know what i was expecting, as I didn't think the original Matrix was that great either: sure, the action was pretty cool, but everything else was a bit hackneyed. A film set in the future where we're all slaves of some kind? Haven't heard of that one before. Plus, in Neo, Morpheus (silly name) and Trinity we had the three most dull characters in the history of cinema. Trinity's obsessive affections for Neo would have been mildly convincing were it not for the fact that Neo, the saviour of the universe, is played by... Keanu Reeves, surely the most baffling phenomenon to strike Hollywood: he's only good at playing morons (Bill and ted, Point Break) and his only talent is being able to make the terrifying notion of a bomb on a bus sound as dull as watching Songs of Praise on a sunday evening. Still, the action was fun, so it weren't all bad.

The Matrix Reloaded is all bad. For a start, it's preposterously straight faced, full of dull portent and cod-philosophy that becomes exceptionally wearing over two or so hours. The total dearth of characterisation is even more obvious second time around: it's this flaw that completely spoils the action, which was the only thing I was even expecting to be good. Sure, it's spectacular, but it's not exciting, or tense, because you know nothing about these half-dimensional characters to feel any suspense for them. Plus, the fact that neo is virtually invincible means that there's no real contest as to who's going to win. there's a fight about every ten minutes, and each fight goes on forever, and not one gets you on the edge of your seat. Sure, it's technically impressive, but there's no soul underneath. It's all a load of self-consciously cool posturing, cheesy in-jokes and lame dialogue.

I really felt bad for seeing this: deep down i knew it was going to pretty poor, but I didn't expect the action to be rubbish as well. It is without a doubt one of the most dull blockbusters ever made: however, it doesn't even have the perverse 'Oh my god I'm watching a once decent saga disintegrate before my very eyes' fascination that the appalling Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones had to offer. No, The Matrix wasn't that great to begin with, and this is worse. Yet, this film is going to be blatantly bigger than God: such a shame. It's easily one of the most pretentious films I've seen in ages, and it's fooling a lot of people into thinking it's something deeply meaningful with the irony-free platitudes spouted interminably by it's blank protagonists (two worst scenes: Morpheus' speech at Zion, and the pointlessly verbose encounter with between Neo and a surprise character at the end), and the fact that everyone wears black and no one smiles at all only adds to the irritating self-importance of it all. No wait, Agent Smith smiles a few times: ironically, he's by far and away the most human character in the film, he was certainly the best thing in the first film, but they really overegged the whole 'Hello, Mr. Anderson' routine this time around. Everyone else acts like they are robots.

It so badly wants to be cool, yet this utterly soulless experience uses a mask of pretension to hide the fact that this is pure trash. And not the kind of trash that's cool. The kind of trash that is quite simply, TRASH.

Really, really poor. And it has what is quite possibly the most unexciting, uninteresting cliffhanger of all time.