Metacritic reviews

If Spider-Man: No Way Home is the poison, this is its antidote.

Where the love story was a means-to-an-end afterthought in the first Matrix, it’s now the crux of the tale, and the emotional undercurrents are so intoxicating that it more than makes up for the relative inelegance of the action scenes.

Forget what you think you know… The Matrix Resurrections is a twisty metanarrative anchored by a love story for the ages.

As any good therapist will tell you, you can't embrace the future without coming to terms with your past. Resurrections is very, very conscious of this.

If we absolutely must have another “Matrix” movie, if we can’t just let it be, then let it be this weird one. Let it be a film with an existential crisis. Let it be a film that’s half a nostalgia cash-in and half a biopic about a filmmaker who’s forced to make a nostalgia cash-in.

While it's heavily nostalgic, The Matrix Resurrections does have something to say about living in the past and the difficulties of moving forward.

It will quench the thirst of die-hard fans who always want more. But does that thirst justify “The Matrix Resurrections?” Maybe. But it can’t make it a great movie. And despite Reeves’ willingness to jump back in, neither can anything else.

The Matrix Resurrections is a bunch of really good ideas stacked together to make a bad — and sometimes ugly — film.

This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.

I was delighted at the beginning, and steadily more appalled at most everything that followed. There's no sugarcoating the fact that I look forward to never seeing this "Resurrection" again.