10 Movies That DELIBERATELY Didn't Give Fans What They Wanted
3. The Matrix Resurrections
It's been barely a month since The Matrix Resurrections was released, and so many are still reeling from a film that stridently, aggressively defied what was expected from it.
Given Hollywood's tendency to rejuvenate ailing franchises with a soft reboot or "requel" - a reboot that's also a sequel - The Matrix seemed ripe for just such a treatment.
Bring back Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss for supporting roles in a fourth movie that would hand the IP off to a new cast of young actors for a new trilogy, right?
Well, that wasn't at all what The Matrix Resurrections was. The film is instead a bewilderingly meta action film that's hyper-aware of its own unnecessary existence, a fact which writer-director Lana Wachowski made gleeful fun of throughout.
Yet what most puzzled many was the film's peculiar lack of quality action. Whatever your opinion of the second and third Matrix films, they at least delivered memorable, boundary-pushing set-pieces, yet even the best action sequence in Resurrections fell far short of that standard.
Clearly Wachowski's heart wasn't in the action, at least in the same way that it was in the first three movies, and she seemed far more concerned with seeing what self-aware madness she could convince Warner Bros. to spend almost $200 million on.