First of all, the reference you're thinking of in that '80s movie was Key MASTER, not Key MAKER.

OK, on to my review.

The Matrix 2 was about ten minutes of sheer awesomeness interspersed with an eternity of mind-boggling suck on a hitherto unwitnessed scale. About half an hour into it, I was thinking "Wow. Battlefield Earth finally has competition." Then there was that way cool fight scene where Neo fights a billion Agent Smiths despite the fact that he could have just flown away. Then there was another eternity of suck. Then Laurence Fishburn stood on a freeway bridge with a katana in one hand and a gun in the other, which pretty much redefined the upper limits of cool for the next thousand years in one single image, and there was an awesome chase sequence. I don't know what happened after that because the rest of the movie almost put me to sleep.

Basically, I wish they had just released the two or three cool scenes chopped out of context and binned everything else. It wouldn't have made the slightest freaking bit of difference to how understandable or interesting the movie was. Seriously, it was IABBBM material, to the extent that I found myself thinking "Ooh, gotta remember THAT line for the smackdown review!" at numerous points.

Keanu Reeves, as we all know, has the acting ability of a tennis ball taped to a stick with a smiley face drawn on. This didn't matter in the first Matrix, but in this one they made the horrible, horrible mistake of actually giving him lines and scenes which required acting. Oh dear God. Make it STOP. A complete lack of acting talent can sometimes be excused in eye-candy movies, but Reeves isn't even eye candy in this one; somehow everybody got *really freaking ugly* between Matrix 1 and 2. Last time out, he looked totally cool; now he just looks like a scrawny, pasty geek in a black dress. I should leave it to the guys to comment on what the hell happened to Trinity, but personally I thought the repulsive never-ending clinches between her and Neo were the closest we'll ever get to seeing Keanu doing a gay love scene.

Also, directors please note, just because you have an actor whose surname is Reeves does not mean the world needs another Superman movie. I'm still trying to decide whether they gave him the flying scenes to make the black dress look cool, or vice versa. Either way it was a mistake.

Having said all this, none of the above would necessarily make a movie suck as bad as this one does. What really made it suck, irrevocably and completely, was the fact that at no point in the entire movie did I give a damn what happened to anybody. Never mind being excited or on the edge of my seat, I wasn't even interested. And that went for virtually the whole movie. Even in the cool scenes, most of the time I was just sitting there registering the action without the slightest sense of involvement on the character/plot level. And when that happens to me in a movie, I have to say that it truly does suck.

Must watch X-Men 2 again ... make the stench go away.