The Matrix Resurrections Parent Guide

Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is one of the best video game designers of his generation. His claim to fame is The Matrix, a hugely influential game about a man who discovers that his reality is merely a simulation run by machines. The game attracted critical praise for its depth, originality, and philosophical influence. The only problem is that Anderson struggles to tell the difference between his games and his life – a challenge that intensifies when he meets Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who tells him that The Matrix was based on reality and he’s now back in the simulation. If he wants to save the love of his life, Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss), he’s going to need to act fast and come back to the real world.

I suppose I should preface this with a confession: I have never been a major Matrix fan. The original is fun, to be sure, and it broke a lot of ground for action movies at the time. Sadly, it’s burdened by sequels which are increasingly consumed with overly complex navel-gazing and muddled storytelling. I was not optimistic about this sequel, and I was right not to get my hopes up.

I suppose the kindest thing I can say is that The Matrix Resurrections has more in common with the original than it does with any of the sequels. The downside is that it shares so much because it spends a huge portion of its runtime just rehashing scenes, characters, and ideas from the first film. It’s like watching a franchise have a real-time mid-life crisis on screen, trying desperately to relive former glories in a tragic attempt to stay relevant to a cultural landscape which has moved on.

Thankfully, the movie’s not as bad as I feared it would be: in all honesty, I was expecting to find myself begging for the sweet release of death by the thirty minute mark. It isn’t that bad, but it isn’t terribly exciting, either. At no point did the film manage to engage me. I’ve been more invested in watching the scenery outside a train window.

There are the usual content concerns for the franchise, which mostly center around highly stylized martial-arts influenced fight scenes. There’s also a smattering of profanity, although rather less than you might expect for an R-rated action flick. The big question for parents is whether your teen has the patience to sit through two-and-a-half hours of half-baked exposition for a franchise which has already run its course, just to be rewarded with some outdated and uninspiring action scenes. I sure don’t.