The spoon may not exist but after watching this third Matrix sequel, you’d wish it didn’t either. A numbing retread of past Matrix antics fastened onto an exasperatingly dull attempt at a revival, The Matrix: Resurrections is a bizarre, lumbering attempt to breath one final breathe into a franchise that redefined science-fiction action when it was first released in 1999. If the intention of this clunker is to make you appreciate the other sequels, job very well done. I take back every bad thing I ever had to say about Reloaded and even Revolutions. The Matrix: Resurrections is the antithesis of revolutionary, too busy looking back to take a step forward without stumbling and landing flat on its face.

To her credit, writer-director Lana Wachowski – operating for the first time without lifelong collaborator and sister Lilly – doesn’t deliver the same boring formula we’ve come to expect from a legacy sequel. If anything, she follows the George Lucas approach, aiming to make this chapter rhyme with the events of the other films. Particularly the first. And still, her deviations from the norm nonetheless leads to a dreadful conclusion. The elder Wachowski has attempted to fly solo. But, much like Neo this go around, she cannot even get off the ground. Much of the ostensibly heady mind game of this Matrix deals with the illusion of choice, where determinism is presented as free will but is nothing of the sort. It’s not truly a choice to opt to save the one you love – it just is what it is. As The Matrix: Resurrections unfurls further and further into abject narrative banality, one wonders if this emphasize on choices having been made for you is Lana’s acknowledgment that when WB comes to you with a blank check to make another Matrix movie, it’s not really even a choice. It’s inevitable.

However it doesn’t seem inevitable that The Matrix: Resurrections had to be this dull. When the-almost intriguing first act essentially copy-pastes the events of the first film, one suspects a rising tide of meta messiness. But then things never really go anywhere. The set-up is a launching pad into a pool without any water. Characters prattle on about this or that in what feels like an endless series of horrifyingly boring monologues. There’s barely a single new character with anything resembling a personality and the movie, desperate for more, more, more connective tissue, brings back folks you don’t expect by virtue of the fact that no-one would ever have asked to see them again.

Then once these characters are in the mix, they have a need to explain who they are, what they’ve done, where they’ve been. And Wachowski’s script lets them with a verbosity that verges on excruciating. It’s a cardinal betrayal of the idea to show, not tell, as The Matrix: Resurrections is so busy telling you everything that it’s doing, that it forgets to actually show us anything of interest.

Neo (Keanu Reeves) is once again Thomas Anderson, a celebrated video game designer known for revolutionizing the industry with a trilogy of games identical to the plot of The Matrix 1-3. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in a soccer mom named Tiffany. They’re both alive and trapped in a new code for reasons that are at first unclear. Reasons that eventually reveal themselves to be stupid, silly. So goes Matrix 4.

The crux of their resurrection, and thereby the crux of this film, is about the bond shared between these characters. And yet the two mopey dark-haired lovers have never seemed so dull. So unhappy to be there. No one has ever accused Reeves of being a terrific actor, and Moss works best within very particular parameters, but the two of them together in this are a blackhole of charisma. Without the energy of a Lawrence Fishburne, their shared scenes are quite bad, absent of spark.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jonathan Groff feature as equally important legacy characters, though re-skinned for reasons that don’t make sense once all is said and done, but neither of them bring much to the table, especially considering the size of the shoes they’ve been asked to fill. Both are okay but aren’t done any favors by a confusing script that wants to have its cake and also have its cake not exist.

The Matrix series is maybe best known for revolutionizing special effects and yet everything here just looks like bad, gummy-bear CGI. Surely it’s a step up from the poorly-aged digital effects work of the Neo vs. Smiths melee from Reloaded but there’s nothing that even attempts to change the dial here. No tilting towards groundbreaking. No attempt to show us something we’ve not seen before.

This is likely due to the fact that The Matrix: Resurrections commits its time and energy to reminding you what was great about its predecessors, often by having the actual film play on a background television or projected on the wall or flashbacked to over and over and over again. Stories are cyclical, we get it. This one is cyclical to the point of being cynical. There’s no time to explore a new dimension in this universe when one is too busy with smugly looking back.

A complete lack of momentum pollutes what little enjoyment this film has to offer. For my sake, I kept checking my watch to figure out how much more of this terribly-paced dud I had to endure. Do yourself a favor and unplug now. Reject your curiosities. As Wachowski repeatedly confuses faux-mind-fuckery and wordiness with good storytelling, mistaking what should have remained in the margins for actual narrative meat, one is faced with what feels like puffy cerebral stupidity, jaundiced and sickly gray matter, posing as intelligent sci-fi. Choice may at times seem like an illusion but I would strongly advise that if you are able to resist the urge and forego your curiosities, do not choose to see The Matrix: Resurrections.

CONCLUSION: Lana Wachowski has attempted to bring her beloved franchise back to life with ‘The Matrix: Resurrections’ but this third sequel has all the brains of Frankenstein. And the charm to match. A bewildering face plant of a film, this fourth (and, I pray, final) movie in the series is a talky, tedious snooze.