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.
