In The Matrix, the two Wachowski brothers essentially tried to make virtues out of vices. It was a good trick, but, like the cartoon vaudeville character who finishes off his act by blowing himself up, it only works once. Any doubts that the first movie was anything more than a high-priced novelty act are vanquished by The Matrix Reloaded, which coats the silver screen slick with flop sweat.

     As they did the first time out, the Wachowskis are determined to make what is, at its core, a martial arts feature with a cast that is, aside from a few weeks of cramming, unskilled in the martial arts. Again, they’ve hired Hong Kong veteran Yuen Wo Ping to instruct Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving in some rudimentary kung fu moves and, more importantly, hook them up to wires to lift them up and over each other in their "fight" scenes. Wire work in Hong Kong films, as outrageous as it sometimes may seem, is essentially used to supplement the martial arts skills of the performers. In the Matrix movies, the approach is turned on its head: The wire work comes first, the nearly non-existent fighting skills of the performers comes second.

     What gets this by the audience – or did in the first movie – is the visual trickery that leaves the performers either dawdling in the air in slow-motion, hanging outright in stop-motion, or speeding in hyper-motion. The Wachowskis intuited that merely cleaning out the wires from view wouldn’t be enough to make Reeves et al. appear credible. But this time out, they’ve feared that the already over-the-top fights of the first film wouldn’t be enough.

     So they’ve turned two of the new movie’s fights into endless, non-stop bores that will be fine advertising reels for the specialty companies that produced them, but little else. One features Reeves – as Neo, the heroic human out to save the remnants of mankind from hostile robots – battling Agent Smith (Weaving), the robot from the first movie who has now developed human characteristics and the ability to produce instant replicants of himself. On and on the fight goes, uninflected by any ebb or flow despite all the quick cutting, save for the increase in the number of Smiths. Another fight, involving moving vehicles on a highway that’s obviously meant to be the movie’s crowning achievement, is even more endlessly boring (once you’ve established there are no limits to reality, then there are no limits to break and no oohs and aahs to elicit). About the only fight that works is a one-on-one between Neo and a character played by Collin Chou who, as a former member of Sammo Hung’s Stuntman Team (according to the film’s press kit), may be assumed to be carrying the action.

     The disjuncture between the quickness of the editing and its lack of dynamism extends to the film as a whole. Again, what the Wachowskis got away with in The Matrix thanks to its stature as a novelty item fails in The Matrix Reloaded. It’s not that the gimmickry was better the first time; a second viewing, presumably would have exposed that, rather than developing any real tension, the duo kept pulling yet one more rabbit out of yet one more hat. This time, though, they can’t cover their tacks. In fact, they seem to have given up trying. For example, over and over throughout the movie, a door is opened to reveal one scene, closed, then opened again to reveal – a different scene! More characters drop in, seemingly from other planets, with action subplots in their backpacks, then obligingly skedaddle.

     This mere illusion of a series of actions building to a pitch, rather than the real thing, leads to a monotonous alternation (called "The Exorcist" Syndrome): A cacophonous clutter of action followed by a soporific plot or "character" bit (often featuring a hammy Fishburne, who seems to be after James Earl Jones’s CNN gig). This extends to putting a major, lengthy, deadening piece of exposition right near the end of the movie, a scene that not only brings everything to a screeching halt just at the exact moment it should be picking up speed but also, if I’m not mistaken, gives away the ending of the next and final installment.

     The Matrix Reloaded features the expected pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo but it is unfair to call the movie on that; this kind of material calls out for it. And as Metropolis and many other movies have demonstrated, the humans vs. robots theme is endlessly fascinating. The fact of the matter is that the Wachowski brothers have yet to get a good movie out of any of it.