Not since Rocky fought Mr. T has a sequel so failed to live up to the quality of the original. The original Matrix was dedicated to keeping the action, surprises, and humor coming, no matter how contradictory, illogical, or downright stupid. Matrix Reloaded is dedicated to the opposite task: establishing that the Matrix "universe" is a complete and consistent foundation on which to build an endless franchise of movies, video games, television series, and comic books. As if that weren't enough of an anchor, the Wachowski brothers are philosophizing like stoned sophomores picking on stoned freshmen: instead of riffing on the worthy theme at hand ("What if everything you knew to be real turned out to be a lie?"), they pretend that they've got an answer, but it lies somewhere beyond pretentious follow-on questions ("What is free will?"). Whoa, dudes.

My single biggest disappointment in the Matrix Reloaded is the utter lack of surprises. Sure, it's revealed that Neo is an accumulated roundoff error, but where the first movie presented its absurdities in dazzling action sequences (being shot causes a stack overflow, kung fu as thread contention), Neo's origin is explicated in a scene where the antagonist can't even summon the energy to get out of a chair. And then, rather than make a joke of it, as in the original where en-Matrixed humans are referred to disparagingly as "coppertops," the dialogue just drags on ... and on ... and on ... until Neo makes a choice that is, as the antagonist accurately says, entirely predictable.

I have to admit that I hoped the title "Reloaded" was a hint that the Matrix was going to get reset, with different rules for the heroes to struggle against. Instead, it's the same old, same old: the world-as-we-know-it, but if you're clued in, you can bend time, gravity, and, apparently, inertia. Unless you're Neo, in which case, you can fly, but only after making a constipated too-much-pizza face. Rather than introduce new twists to the structure of the Matrix (like the centipede with which they "bugged" Neo in the original), Reloaded introduces new autonomous computer programs as characters, all of whom have "The" as a first name (The Merovingean, The Keymaker, etc.). What these characters do, mostly, is talk. Except for The Keymaker, who makes keys.

When the characters run short of hyper-pronunciated edicts, they do kung fu. Which should be reason enough to like the movie: what's not to like about trained athletes performing an intricately choreographed ballet at lightning speeds? Except that Matrix Reloaded has an early sequence that establishes, once-and-for-all, that computer animation is able to seamlessly represent a fight sequence. And once that's established, it robs all subsequent sequences of their tension - it's hard to be impressed by a roundhouse hook-kick combination when half an hour previously it was made abundantly clear that any imaginable move can be rendered by digital animators. Ironically, I'm sure there were shots of real stuntworkers, cars, and motorcycles in later scenes that I dismissed as computer-generated, but that has to be a predictable response in a movie whose very theme is that the world as we know it is computer-generated.