As we rejoin the story, we learn the following: Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are together having the best orgasms of their lives, glowing with passion as though they've been irradiated. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) never changes the tone of his voice in casual conversation, ever. Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) can replicate himself faster than Christians in a trailer park, and unless something is done quickly, 250,000 sentinels will dig their way to Zion and kill all the humans.

How do our heroes combat this awful threat? Leather and sunglasses, of course. Most actors will tell you that wearing sunglasses is one thing they hate to do because it denies them their most vital acting tools: the eyes. Since Reeves has no vital acting tools, this explains much, including "Hardball," "The Watcher" and "Sweet November" (the film where he boinks a cancer-stricken Charlize Theron to the music of Enya). Either that or his pupils are swaying about like Larry Eustachy at a sorority mixer.

So after turning self-consciously intellectual, this is what the newly reclusive Wachowski brothers bring us? Andy (the smart one) and Larry (the slow one) serve up a second-rate humanistic philosophy that will have you wondering whether Gandhi's secret dream might have been to dance around in slow motion and pump bullets into everything that moved. Rest assured that once you wake up from the fantasy of the hype to the reality of the film, you'll feel like Neo in the original, when his pretend world fell away and he discovered he actually lived in a tiny pod with one tube in his mouth and another in his ass.