The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

Director: Lana Wachowski

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abudl-Mateen II, Jada Pinkett Smith

Have I Seen it Before: Well, there were a few moments there in the early going where I thought I might have…

Did I Like It: I never really liked the first two Matrix sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003). I think the—perhaps over-lauded—philosophical depth of The Matrix (1999) became far too self conscious as the series progressed. The Wachowskis knew what side of their bread ought to be buttered, and so also made sure to stop the navel-gazing at various (occasionally incomprehensible) times to be an action movie again. The whole affair of those sequels only served to be so aggressively uneven that even now, nearly twenty years later, that’s the only real reaction I have to those two films.

So, I can say with some joy that, for the most part, this is the best Matrix film since the original. The first act is an interesting meditation on just what The Matrix has become since the premiere of the original film. It feels different, and even if it attaches itself to that ponderous quality which dragged down previous efforts, it is specifically calibrated to consistently surprise. 

Then it all becomes a very tedious continuation of the plot threads left dangling from Resurrections. A real big drag of one. Am I supposed to have some kind of reaction from a reunion with both General Niobe (Smith) and The Merovingian (Lambert Wilson)? If I am, I don’t think it’s the reaction for which Lana Wachowski likely hoped.

But then the finale, where Trinity (Moss) comes into her own and evolves beyond just being Keanu Reeves’ girlfriend that the film reaches (if not completely accomplishes) something more visceral, and potentially more special.

So, it’s all still suspiciously uneven. Again. That just makes it a very natural part of the larger saga. I’m just glad I can get on board with some of the parts presented, even if they don’t quite fit together as well as they could within the individual film in which they’re presented.

The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

Have I Seen it Before: After The Matrix Reloaded (2003), I wondered if I even needed to see another Matrix movie, but sometimes you’re a college freshman and people are going to the theater, and it’s not like you have anything better to do.

Did I Like It: And at that time, I kind of liked, or at least I liked it better than I did the second film. It had a rousing finale. The duality between Neo (Reeves) and Agent Smith (Weaving) fills a few intriguing minutes. The realization that the only way the war between the human resistance and the machines will end is by them being forced to work together is worth chewing on for a few moments. I’ve seen far worse trilogy cappers, based on that list.

It’s almost enough to ignore the fact that I don’t think anyone can adequately explain just what happened at the end of the movie. Did Neo die? Did he become a machine? Did he become Smith? Does the end even matter? I suppose I can live with ambiguity in my movie*, or at any rate I’ll have to accept it because that’s all that we have on the menu. But did we have to put up with extended mech battles that seem like they were taken from a rejected version of Alien 3 (1992)? Or, more importantly, a scene that runs through what feels like its own feature length runtime and takes place entirely in a hermetically sealed subway station?

Maybe I don’t like the film at all, as it turns out? Should I even watch the fourth film?

I probably will… Probably. 

*Does the fourth movie resolve any of that? Still remains to be seen here on these reviews, but if I know my Wachowskis (or even half of them), I’m betting the answer is no.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. After The Matrix (1999) I was pretty excited about it. When I heard the Wachowskis were producing their sequels back-to-back, a la the same process used for Back to the Future - Part II (1989) and Back to the Future - Part III (1990), I got even more excited. It felt like they were doing things right.

Did I Like It: And that excitement sort of evaporated. Instantly. The balance between mythologyesque/adventurey and the more religiousy/allegoryish elements of the original film moved all the way to the religiousy end of the spectrum. That may not be the right criticism for this movie in particular, but the Matrix sequels as a whole certainly landed there. This one seems more like a relentless chase sequence that expands on the original film’s main feature… And that is making a bunch of story promises that the additional movies can’t or wont’ payoff.

Sure, the freeway segment probably doesn’t get enough credit for being a pretty spectacular action sequence, but the extended rave sequence in the city of Zion is such a protracted exercise in self-indulgence that I honestly wonder if Kevin Smith didn’t direct it. It exists merely to be cool and has so little to do with the scraps of a story filling the remaining two and a half hours, that I’m sort of surprised that J.J. Abrams didn’t take over the production at some point.

I suppose that’s probably enough snark to spread around for one movie, but ultimately this feels like a list of cool things (raves, flying sequences, techno vampires) desperately searching for a story. They didn’t have a story to continue, but they jammed just enough philosophy and pyrotechnics into a package to convince some people.

The Matrix (1999)

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving

Have I Seen it Before: I mean, how would somebody get through the 2000s, own a DVD player the entire damn time, and not see this movie? I’m legitimately curious.

Did I Like It: As is usually the case, it’s difficult to write about a movie that changed the face of cinema ever since, and sometimes in good ways. One could write about how the mythology in the film influenced genre filmmaking, but then you’d also have to note how the series never quite capitalized on its singularly Campbellian display of the monomyth here, but that almost seems like a better discussion to have during the reviews of those movies, especially the persistently discouraging sequels*.

I could talk about how the narrative has changed slightly in the twenty-plus years since its initial release. It’s become something of a parable for the trans/non-binary experience, especially after the Wachowskis transitioned. But they deny that such a parable was at least consciously the case, and there are any number of other writers who could pontificate on that point far more eloquently than I could. 

I might go back to the critique I had of the movie back in the day, that Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) might have had a point. The real world of the story is so drab and awful and filled with frequent death, and the Matrix seems… okay enough? Who wouldn’t want to go back into The Matrix? Between the gender parable and just growing up a little bit, that criticism rings hollow.

So, where am I left in this review? It’s a very fine film and if you have, indeed, somehow made it to this point in life without seeing the film, you certainly should. The thing that I was struck by in this viewing was that I had always taken the film as a piece filmed in Chicago, with all of the character of that town. The Wachowskis come from there. And yet, the film wasn’t shot there at all, and instead is a product of Australia, utilizing studio facilities whose biggest contributions to the form up until that point was Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie (1995). I thought I had gotten so sophisticated in my viewing that I could always pick out when a film was shot in a real city or not. This film continues to surprise me. That’s more than a little something.

*At press time, I haven’t yet watched The Matrix Resurrections (2021), but I do get the impression that it isn’t exactly going to bring the whole together all of a sudden.

Speed (1994)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Certainly. Several times. Hell, the title of one of my upcoming books is a reference to the film.

Did I Like It: We could fill the entire bandwidth of the various streaming services several times over with the clones of Die Hard (1988) that were produced in the ten-fifteen years after that film’s release. Many of them are truly bad. More than a few of them beg an investigation as to why they even exist in the first place.

Then there’s Speed.

Every piece of Speed fits together. That is not to say any moment of it is believable, but I have a hard time picking a moment from the film that feels incongruous with any of the other parts. One might say that the film really ends when the passengers get off the bus, and the movie definitely runs out of narrative when Howard Payne (Hopper—oh, sweet, sweet, Hopper*) loses his head. But these are nitpicks from a film that ages far better than some of the contemporary films, like The Rock (1996) or Bad Boys (1995), or really any of Michael Bay’s films, now that I’ve had a minute to think about it.

I will say that this film rests squarely in the least-engaging (although not entirely un-engaging) period in the screen career of Keanu Reeves. He has tried to shed the early exuberance of a Ted “Theodore” Logan, and is content to be merely earnest as all get-out. He’ll work through this period and become the shy near-Buddha we all know and love today, but is any character in an action movie from this era anything more than a prop designed to move plot forward? Just ask Jason Patric.

*Come to think of it, both of my upcoming books have some pretty direct lines into this movie. Maybe in the far flung future, people will refer to this as my “Dennis Hopper period” and be supremely disappointed when they realize what that really means.

Bill & Ted Face The Music (2020)

Director: Dean Parisot

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine

Have I Seen it Before: No. Haven’t seen this Bill and Ted movie before. Feels nice to type that.

Did I Like It: As I type this, it’s been about two days since I watched the movie, and I can’t quite get it out of my head. That’s a good thing.

I could talk about flaws that any film might have. Some of the jokes and plot points are telegraphed. I had a feeling that Rufus’ great prophecy would have quite a bit to do with Bill (Winter) & Ted’s (Reeves) daughters after about twenty minutes. I figured Deacon (Beck Bennett) was going to be Missy’s new spouse after I heard the casting announcement.

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the film took years to get off the ground, and I was pretty sure there for a while that it wasn’t going to happen. I love Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), and have since they were brand new. My affection for those films only grew as I did, when it became clear that the films (and their protagonists were way smarter than they first let on. This is the only film still standing in the 2020 release slate that I was looking forward to. I’m really glad that I got to watch it.

It’s genuinely, off-the-wall funny, perhaps just as much so as its predecessors. The robot charged with assassinating the great ones (played by Anthony Carrigan) is one of the nimbler comic creations in recent memory. I’d say more, but it would be ruining most of the fun for you. To not belabor the point, I’ve just mentioned the character’s name a couple of times since seeing the movie, my wife and I break out into laughter.

But this film is of a piece with the rest other films in the series in a far more profound way. I’ve always viewed the more harebrained time travel shenanigans were a metaphor for the writing process. Forgot to introduce the trash can before you needed it to get out of trouble? Just go back and put it in. Time travel is like that, and so is writing multiple drafts of something.

Here, the forward motion of the plot solidified something I knew about the creative process but puts it into stark relief. Billie and Thea try to help their Dads by going back in time and forming the greatest band in the universe to play the song that will put the universe back on track. Where to start? Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still). Hendrix can only be convinced if his hero, Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft) is brought into the mix. Armstrong brings in Mozart (Daniel Dorr). Mozart yearns to jam with Ling Lun (Sharon Gee), who ten imagines that rhythm began and end with Grom (Patty Anne Miller). The band is formed, but the Preston/Logan scions don’t think they are the genius behind the music. But they are the ones that can bring the greatest bass player in the universe, The Grim Reaper (William Sadler). They just like what they like, and they put together what worked.

But that’s all they ever needed to do. It’s all any creative person can do, really. As somebody who’s work has been dismissed a number of times as just fan fiction, I knew that, but it was nice to hear it.

I really love this movie. It is my favorite movie of 2020. Had we gotten the pleasure of a full slate of movies this year, I imagine I would still put it at number 1.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

Director: Pete Hewitt

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, William Sadler, George Carlin

Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, without a doubt. Come to think of it, the novelization for the film may have been the first book not exclusively marketed for children that I ever read… Not sure why I chose that moment to admit that.

Did I like it?: The filmmakers and cast themselves have decided that this was one-half of a very clever film, and another half of a film that had no idea what to do with itself other than attach itself to a delirium-fueled inside joke (Station!) between the writers.

Maybe I just saw the film for the first time when I was seven, that golden age when films are great and any kind of critical filter is a thing of diminished older beings. And when I came back to the film as I got older, I could only appreciate it more. Convention wisdom would have dictated another trip through time, hitting the exact same notes as the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). One need only look to the sequels to Back to the Future (1985). To listen to the commentary on the Blu Ray, there was talk of having Bill and Ted travel through the realm of fiction to pass a troublesome literature class, which is different enough, but I am glad they avoided, for <purely selfish reasons.>

Instead, the sequel to Excellent Adventure turns out to be a fairly effective remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). What a demented, inspired choice. Honestly, between this and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) we got some truly next-level comedy sequels in the early 1990s. 

Complaints are scant and largely cosmetic. I only noticed on this screening that the heroes embedded homophobia is still on display (although the movie doesn’t stop all together to wallow in such a moment) and there is far too little George Carlin in the film to truly satisfy, especially since we’re not going to get him in a film any time soon. On an odd note, I’m now often struck by my theory as to how much this film might have inspired some of the design choices eighteen years later in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009). The lecture auditorium at Bill & Ted University so starkly resembles the bridge of the Enterprise from that film, whereas the brief glimpse of the lair of De Nomolos (Joss Ackland, who legend tells hated being in the movie as much as the character himself hated living the Stallyns’ future) looks like the clockwork interior of the Narada. Even the clothes worn by Rufus (Carlin) and his attempts to chase the villains back in time bring to mind Spock in that film.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

Director: Stephen Herek

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin, Hal Landon Jr.

Have I Seen it Before: Uhhh… Yeah. I first became interested in my wife because she randomly mentioned both this film and Back to the Future (1985) in a conversation. It lives in me.

Did I Like It: I remember my fourth grade teacher saying at one point that both this movie and the characters within it were among the dumbest she had ever seen. That statement stuck with me beyond anything else that particular educator said (including her name, now that I think about it) is both an indictment of anything that happened at an institute named after Robert E. Lee, and the fact that even at the age of 10 I so vehemently disagreed with this assessment so immediately.

The movie is not stupid. Any movie that pins a button on the uniform of Napoleon Bonaparte (Terry Camilleri) for eating ice cream and then makes him an absolute fiend for water slides is not stupid. I could keep going on this list of reasons the film itself is not stupid, when you should really go watch the film and experience it for yourself.

But Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) are not dumb, either. They are exceptionally bright, sort of ridiculously so, but incomplete as people. They are ignorant, but not willfully ignorant. Therein lies their charm. They learn an exceptionally large amounts of information about history in 90 minutes of runtime.

Now, there is a moment in the film that plays so sourly that one is immediately tempted to think the whole movie suffers. After thinking that Ted had died at the hand of one of their antagonists in Medieval England, the members of Wyld Stallyns are reunited and embrace. Horrified, they immiedately push away from one another and call each other fags. 

Now, unlike Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) which went out of its way to predicate its entire plot on each and every character being suddenly and irreparably transphobic, this moment may not age well, but it does feel like two teenage boys of the 1980s would probably have internalize this precise measure of homophobic toxic masculinity. This alone makes their fate as the saviors of all human kind far harder to swallow then any amateurish guitar riff they might play.

They do get better, as Rufus says. We’ll all see soon enough, but even the course of this excellent adventure they have made quantum leaps forward in that regard.

Always Be My Maybe (2019)

Director: Nahnatchka Khan

Cast: Ali Wong, Randall Park, James Saito, Keanu Reeves

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, but…

Did I Like It: Also yes.

Nora Ephron is dead, and thus, I’m reasonably sure that there isn’t going to be much new to discover within the genre of the romantic comedy. That being said, if the right alchemy of a charming cast and genuine laughs—as it does in this film—then my mind can actually forget for long stretches of time that this is fitting into a tried and true format. 

These characters are my age, dealing with variations on the same problems I deal with in my life, which is another interesting layer to the modern romantic comedy. Whereas before, the Toms Hanks and Megs Ryan of the world maintained a distant association with my parents generation, I find it much easier to identify with these characters. And yes, that is even with nearly every major character is of a different ethnic background than myself. White people would have a far easier and more enjoyable time of it if they just got over their anxiety about deeper representation in film.

There are moments where the traditional beat leak through. At about the half-way mark when Sasha (Wong) and Marcus (Park) are finally in the relationship they were always meant to be in, it’s clear that more peril awaits them, but up until that point I’m having so much fun with the Keanu Reeves sub-plot, I hadn’t given it all a second thought.

And Reeves is an unbelievably fresh breath of air in the movie. I quietly wonder how thick the boundary between fictional Keanu and real Keanu actually is. It’s easily the zaniest part of the film, and it only more makes me excited for the forthcoming Bill and Ted Face the Music, and that Reeves still has those comedic muscles that he is itching to flex.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves

Have I Seen it Before: I’m sorry, I got distracted by the question. I heard a voice whispering for me to see him, whatever that means.

Did I Like It: At this point, I may be burned out on the Dracula mythos (for any number of reasons). But even so, this movie is interested in doing a lot things not necessarily seen before in Dracula films, that I think it all holds together.

First of all, this movie is a marvel of casting. Between Cary Elwes, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Richard E. Grant, and Billy “The Motherfuckin’ Rocketeer” Campbell, the call sheet is like a mid-90s party and everyone is invited. 

Even Keanu Reeves, who history and assumption assumes is miscast in the role of Jonathan Harker equates himself well in the proceedings, if his British accent is occasionally wavering, but not in a Kevin Costner sort of way. Gary Oldman is a well-oiled acting machine, bringing vivid life to all of the dread count’s various shades. The only member of the cast who seems in over their head is Sadie Frost as the ill-fated Lucy Westerna. One can’t help but wonder if a bigger star, like a Michelle Pfeiffer* or Julia Roberts** might have offered a more memorable performance.

The movie that surrounds these performances feels a little long, even though it comes in at just a little bit over two hours. This may be a byproduct of the Coppola aesthetic. Still, there is a playful quality about the film. Beginning with an aesthetic pulled directly from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1992), slowly but surely transitioning into a more modern (or at least, modern for the time) monster movie with sumptuous photography and makeup work meant to startle more than inspire dread. Coppola loves movies so dearly, and he wants us to love this one too. His efforts at seduction are mostly, if not entirely successful.

*Although in that universe, we would have likely been deprived of her performance in Batman Returns, and I don’t think that is a Faustian bargain I am willing to make.

**Which I’m not that in favor of, mainly because Julia Roberts has been and always will be a frightful bore. Prove me wrong.