THE MATRIX AA
Starring Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano.
Written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski
Cineplex Odeon theatres * * *

Maybe it’s time to rethink this desensitization thing.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that the old popcult as mass-opiate theory -- the one that likens overdoses of mediated sex, violence and general inanity to fixes of spiritual heroin -- is off target; that the real “junk” in junk culture isn’t the stuff that makes us desensitized to boinking, brutality and brainlessness (if so, why do we keep buying?), but the kind that turns genuine concerns into assembly-line cliches.

Take paranoia, the dramatic fuel that propels the high-octane pleasure of The Matrix. A divertingly kick-ass exercise in cyberpop/eye candy, it’s also proof of the siphoning of anxiety by the cultural mainstream. For when conspiracy becomes commodity, maybe we’ve become desensitized to something more than just sensation. Maybe we’ve lsot our god-given right to be freaked out.

Apart form the dubious suggestion that there might be something messianic about Keanu Reeves, the movie’s befuddledly hunky hero, The Matrix, for all its frantic whispering about conspiracy, control and altered realities, offers little by way of genuinely worrisome stuff.

on the contrary, it may be the most voraciously kleptomaniac movie to plunder the cultural supermarket since Beavis and Butt-head did America.

A gothic cyberpunk conspiracy thriller influenced equally by graphic nobels, rave culture and Hong Kong martial arts movies, The Matrix, which was written and directed by Bound‘s Andy and Larry Wachowski, leaves no contemporary conbention of digital-era entertainment unmolested.

From the Microsoft meets Kafka plot -- involving an almond-eyed hacker (Reeves) sucked into a reality-warping perceptual rabbit hole in which Chamber of Commerce-issue men-in-black do mind-bending battle with designer cyber-sandinistas -- to the H.R. Giger meets Blade Runner visual design, The Matrix bludgeons you with a furious familiarity. Indeed, even the movie’s inteminable expositional passages about tampered realities -- that already overworked live-or-Memorex schtick -- are about as unsettling as first season reruns of The X-Files.

“Have you ever had a dream Neo, that you were so sure was real?” the mysterious chrome-domed guru named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) asks the convincingly confused Reeves. “What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”

Right. Whatever. A more reasonable question might be “How can you keep from dozing off while I read yet another of these post-virtual-what-is-reality spiels?” So please boys: just spare us the cybergeek metaphysics and lay on the gas? Okay?

And when they do, when the indisputably gifted freres Wachowski dump the pop-philosophical baggage and just floor the sucker, The Matrix has visceral jolts to burn. There’s a factory-farm for difitally incubated fetuses, which is genuinely creepy, and the slo-mo martial arts shootouts (choreographed by renowned Hong Kong fight maestro Yuen Wo Ping) have a truly deranged kinetic beauty: imagine a John Woo bulletfest crossed with Jackie Chan’s feet of flurry.

Moreover, as Speed first made clear, there is a reason god created Keanu Reeves, and it’s got nothing to do with donning wigs and reciting the complete works of Shakespeare: Like a prize piece of well-bred horseflesh, he never looks better (not to meantion more comfortable) than when he’s strapped into something that is moving faster than the speed of thought.

And provided it stays in mindless hyperdrive, The Matrix mostly rocks. But when you can think faster than it moves, when yo start to auestion its logic, tkae stock of its debts or simply grow headachy from its Rorschach-standard conspiracy scenarios, it reveals itself for the less-than-meets-the-eye brain snack that it is.

And if there’s one thing no self-respecting bit of high-concept trash should do, it’s allow you to grow bored from a surfeit of prepackaged paranoia. Not only is that bad for entertainment, it bodes ill for those times we’ve really got something to worry about.

Retyped by Heather on April 27th, 1999. Printed exactly as previously printed by the Toronto Star.