Even die-hard fans of the classic motorcycle-cop show CHiPs get a pass for skipping CHiPs ’99, the abysmal TV-movie tribute. Coming 20 years after the original show, CHiPs ’99 was utterly bizarre: It juxtaposed a follow-on story with recycled clips, cameos from old actors, and weird reshoots of old scenes. The plot was plainly irrelevant — it was more a narrative towel rack to be heaped high with random clips and throwbacks, a vehicle for shameless self-congratulatory reminiscences. The net effect of this curious project was to take a whiz in our collective cornflakes, to pollute whatever fond memories we may have had of the original. I still can’t fathom why it was made.
Well wax on, wax off, and abracadabra, because you’ve just read my review of The Matrix Resurrections.
I was excited for this film, and the story had some promise. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is back in the Matrix, chugging blue pills daily and meeting with his therapist, The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris). Neo is a game designer now, and the movies we saw two-odd decades ago were, we are told, his video games in this world. (Or were they!) Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is a married mom of two who occasionally locks eyes with Neo in a coffee shop called Simulatte. A new Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and ship-captain Bugs (Jessica Henwick) do the whole white-rabbit-red-pill routine and unplug Neo yet again. They load up the hover-ship and head to the latest Zion-esque city (now called Io), trying to plot a way to get Trinity out of the Matrix. But does she even want to leave?
At its core, this is not a terrible idea for a follow-on story, but it drowns in a fractal mess of quasi-philosophizing and irrelevant meta-banter, whilst being lost amid a seemingly unending parade of cameos and reshot scenes. If you thought the Wachowskis were high on their own supply by the third installment, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
There’s a much shorter, much cleverer film in here somewhere, and even this Frankenstein does have its moments: Bugs and the new Morpheus are fun; Neil Patrick Harris is eminently watchable, as is Jonathan Groff (who plays the King in Hamilton). Carrie-Anne Moss is good here, and it’s nice to see her again; and while Keanu drifts through the film like patchy-bearded Quaalude-Jesus, this is in line with expectation and is what we know and love him for now.
I confess to being totally mystified by positive reviews for this film. Best I can tell, the thing that trips people up is how very meta Resurrections is. A film that talks about itself! That pokes fun at its own legacy and source material! That blatantly reshoots our favorite scenes of old, and bookends them with recurrent references to normative binary politics! So self-aware! And if I don’t understand it, it must be good!
I’m not sold.
Regardless whether Lana Wachowski fancies herself in on the joke, make no mistake: this is a bad movie. It’s boring. There’s no mystery. There’s nothing at stake. It’s pointless. It’s a bloated, two-and-a-half-hour daisy-chain of cameos and reshoots and surprisingly bad visual effects that hits you repeatedly in the face with self-referential clues (like the Analyst’s black cat actually being named Deja Vu). What’s more, as a follow up to a film that boasted genre-defining special effects, the acorn has fallen quite far from the tree: Resurrections disappoints almost from the opening shot with crude CGI, unimaginative rehashed set design, and other trappings befitting a cheap TV soap opera. (Entire scenes seem to have been shot on low-grade fixed focus cameras.)
I find it ironic that this film, whilst loudly wailing about how mindless our content has become, is itself such a prime example of the phenomenon. Even today — deep in the third pandemic wave when the unexpected is all but routine — “CHiPs ’99 meets The Matrix” was still an unwelcome surprise.
Haus Verdict: A promising idea and some memorable performances gutted by irrelevant tangents, smug direction, recycled content, and cheap VFX.
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