Way past redemption

My eyelids droop down, each one a curtain lowered on a hallucinogenic theatre, where streams of pulsating light rapidly fuse and fission, coil and unwind. It's pretty, true enough, in its swirly-whirly way, but also hypnotic - if I stare at it for too much longer I'm going to be well and truly out of it.

Should I fight the power that's sedating me - or give in to it? After all, if I do, perhaps some Gap model wearing an unravelling piece of soiled knitwear will pull a king-sized jackplug out of the nape of my neck, and I'll find myself no longer in a West End cinema watching The Matrix Revolutions, but in a no more believable - but distinctly perkier - reality.

I hope so, because while to zone out in one multimillion-dollar sci-fi extravaganza can be unfortunate, to zone out in its sequel looks like a disaster for the directors. The word was that while The Matrix Reloaded, released earlier this year, was a bit of a virtual sow's ear - oddments of back-story and off-cuts of narrative crudely stitched onto the silk purse of 1999's The Matrix - this one, the third in the cycle, would set things to rights. "Everything that has a beginning has an end" - or so the advertising shout line for the film assails its potential audience. And while this may be a lift from the script, it's hard not to see it as a riposte on the part of Warner Brothers to the near-universal condemnation of Reloaded.

Either that, or it's that most unprecedented of things, a sincere commitment on the part of a Hollywood studio not to go on punishing us year-in, year-out with another piece of franchise entertainment that's aeons past its see-by date. At the end of The Matrix Revolutions, a fresh-faced kid (known only as "the Kid") who's been in the thick of the battle to repel the Machine Army from Zion scrambles across the scrapyard of discarded special effects crying out: "It's over! It's over!" to the general - if weary - delight of his comrades. This was the only point in 128 inexorably execrable minutes when I felt like cheering, too.

All of which is by way of saying that this film is a giant, genetically reared turkey, and you should stay away unless you want it to peck your brain out. How did it all go so wrong for the writer/director Wachowski Brothers? The Matrix was hardly 2001 or Blade Runner, but it was the right sci-fi film at the right time to capture our collective queasiness about the creeping virtuality of our environment.

By juxtaposing one credible world (our own) with another that we could suspend disbelief in (our world as "the Matrix"), it produced an unsettling sense in its viewers, as reality itself seemed to undulate. Granted, the Wachowskis had chucked in a great deal of philosopho-mystic hokum, garnered from sources as diverse as Jean Baudrillard and the Bible, but it didn't get in the way of the spectacle. Nor did the universally acknowledged fact that Keanu Reeves can't act matter while there was at least a plausible world foreshadowing him. But in The Matrix Reloaded, everything began to unravel. Now that Reeves's Neo was established as Humanity's redeemer, the love affair between him and Carrie-Ann Moss's Trinity became the solution to all narrative inconsistencies.

Trouble is, the last thing Keanu can play is human, let alone human-in-love; with his wooden features and strangulated emotional range he'd be better off as the ever-multiplying android Agent Smith.

There was this, and there was yet more syncretistic silliness, as the Oracle was matched against the Architect, as respectively the Shiva and the Vishnu of this pixellated pantheon. But, most importantly, the world-as-Matrix was now set against the staggeringly implausible Zion, an underground city constructed entirely out of rusty iron, where the citizenry held slo-mo raves to the accompaniment of sweaty steel drummers in a "Temple" which looked like the Bat Cave on growth hormone.

The Matrix Revolutions carries on exactly where Reloaded left off. The computer-generated effects - which, in the original film, more or less appropriately garnished the dish - are now all there is to eat; and two-plus hours of meteoric martial arts, flying chases and potholing spaceships fighting metallic squids is the cinematic equivalent of a main course consisting entirely of parsley.

I'd like to say there are a few moments of genuine excitement, or clever irony, or indeed anything at all that somehow manages to puncture the portentous complacency of this twaddle - but there aren't.