Original Desmond

As someone who has been involved on and off with martial arts since the age of 7 and has watched zillions of martial arts movies, i'm very critical about fight scenes on screen

Now the fight scenes in the matrix, all i gotta say is they should have coughed up more money to get Jet Li!

The fight scene with the Smith agents had some cool set moves but overall was way too long. Keanu's moves are just too forced, his basic martial arts expertise is so very obvious. Carrie anne, i'm sorry babe, your terrible !

you can't but that kind of talent, i'm sorry. Jet , Jackie and most of the top HK movie stars could do heaps better with a much less budget

UKingdom

Jet Li would have played Seraph; I'm not sure how much better it would have been. You have to remember, Keanu has to fight in these scenes too. You can't expect a Hollywood actor to fight like Jet Li who has trained all his life. The trick is to speed up the fight scenes. They did this is in Fist of Legend and other things; here they fought like they would in real time, so maybe that's what made the scenes look dull (apart from not being very innovative and repetitive)

Tarantino

I liked the fights.

madcougar

Not knowing my @$$ from a hole in the ground with regard to martial arts, I liked it quite a bit.

uteotw

The dumbest thing about the fight scenes, I thought, were that Neo could fly away at any moment. Why stand there and fight 100 agents when he could just "up up & away"? Just for something to do? That aside, I thought they were awesome, and Jet Li would have only added to the mix.

DVDHO

Jet Li does kick a$$ but the dude cant act at all,im not saying Reeve's can act but he has some talent,IMO Jet Li makes a damm good B flick and I would have prolly passed on Reloaded if he was in it,sorry all its just the way I feel,he is a better fit for those low budget movies that come out once or twice a year,does anyone remember a movie called The One?

mzupeman2

Here goes, the answer in my own opinion:
Neo is 'The One' and he knows he has defeated Smith before. He's not afraid, and more in touch with using his special abilities than before. Smith revealing himself not to be an 'Agent' anymore, Neo sees no reason why not to go ahead and put Smith back in his place again when Smith starts the fight. More come and during this fight scene, Neo gets touched here and there but nothing compared to what he's doing with all the Smiths. I think it's pretty amazing that he was able to handle his own against so many Smiths. Damn amazing scene. But when he was getting dogpiled and such, and the numbers of Smith were obviously not going to thin in the least, in fact, exactly the opposite, Neo decided to live to fight another day. Also back on the ship, Trinity had said 'come on get out of there'... and the fact that almost right after he did, it could have been another way to show the connection between Neo and Trinity.

badger1997

I think too many people go into movies these days to nitpick any martial arts scenes there might be in it. I know absolutely nothing about martial arts and was wowed by every single damn fight scene in the movie. If you are watching with such a critical eye and not just losing yourself in the movie, I think you are doing yourself a disservice. At least, that's my opinion.

TCG

1. Exactly. In Fist of Legend, they sped it up. But at least in the MAtrix, they have an excuse to (if they do), but i dont think they have.

2. Chou is a much better actor than Jet Li. For that reason alone, he's better in the part.

TCG

it made perfect sense to me watching it. Neo obviously thought he could take them. He had no idea that Smith could create THAT many.

He fought until Smith's multiplying power became too much, and they simply overwhelmed him. When he realized he had no chance, he took off.

Corvin

I agree, although I don't think they do this disservice on purpose and I have to wonder if it's really avoidable.

That being said, I think the scenes were awesome. Especially Neo vs. the Smiths. Reeve's basic martial arts knowledge might stand out to, say, someone with years of experience, but to the mass audiences it looks like he knows his stuff.

Also, it takes some time for Neo to fly away. He always had to create that wave effect before flying, so that could be a plausible explanation as well. The Smiths weren't exactly going to let him get away.

Krug

I thought the fight scenes were cool. Unlike say, in Hero, where you had Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi pretend to fight. I thought the fight at the staircase was actually more exciting and fun.

B.A.

Most amazing fight scenes ever, imo. I refuse to nitpick them.

atari2600

agreed bahist. just friggin amazing.

did the actor who played smith have to tape himself like 100 times over to play all those parts? how the hell did they film those fight scenes?

tor_greg

There was a casting call for people that fit Hugo Weaving's physical profile.

Bandoman

I thought the fight scenes were fine. It's true that Keanu isn't a martial arts expert, but that didn't detract from the fun for me. Knowing that one Smith could handily kill any "normal" human, it made Neo's standstill against multiple Smiths pretty cool.

Jet Li would have been better as Seraph, but it's such a small part (in terms of screen time) that his absence didn't bother me.

If this were "merely" a martial arts movie, I would have been disapopinted, but the fighting was just part of the overall spectacle. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

clemente

Yes, they can, because they're life long trained martial artist. Narrowing your field of actor requirements for this movie to life long trained martial artist limits who you can cast....and if you look at HK stars there lack of command of the English language would hamper the movie much more than Keanu's rudimentary command of martial arts.

hypeiv

I also don't know anything about martial arts, but it seemed all the fighting was a block then a pause, making it a choppy fighting style... I like the stuff in the first one better.

theneobez

I'm with you. The movie has the finest action sequences and fight scenes along with the finest story line I have encountered.

SunMonkey

A few points from my perspective.

1. Neo knows most every martial art there is, so his "style" may well look bad to one only focused one or two styles.

2. Bad or not, a good portion of Neo fighting in the Smith gang fight was computer generated. Jet Li, Bruce Lee, or the Dali Lama would all have the same look in that sense when fighting.

3. Knowledge of martial arts also plays little in how wire work looks.

4. As was seen in The Phantom Menace, just because you see two actor fighting doesn't mean it is actually the actors fighting. Stunt fighters, with CGI faces of the actual actors might have been used. I don't know if this was the case in Reloaded, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

5. My problem with the Smiths fight rested soley on the cloth rendering, which to my eye just didn't look right.

jarofclay73

Like every other American movie which features Kung-Fu style fighting, the fight scenes are shot too tight.

Although Reloaded was technically better than the first, I feel the story element surrounding the fights was missing (e.g. fighting to talk to the Oracle). Sometimes I felt there was fighting for the sake of fighting. There was no element of danger that someone could die or even get hurt.

devilshalo

Four words:

Too. much. slow. motion.

trigun

The thing that I didn't like about the fights in Reloaded compared to some flicks I recently saw (Blade 2, Brotherhood of the Wolf) and the original Matrix, is that fights didn't seem to have any "umph" to them. In the first Matrix, every punch and kick looked and sounded very solid. Snipes was brutal in Blade 2. I winced when Mani would send guys flying with kicks in the stomach.

collven

OK, I'll be the first to admit, the fight scenes looked cool, on a technical level. But, come on, did we need a good 25% of the movie taken up by fighting. It got old very fast for me. My wife even looked at me and said it was stupid during the Smith fight. Now, I won't go that far, but like jarofclay said, there's no way that Neo or Morpheus were going to lose any of their fights, so what was the point of them lasting that long. I think the Wachiowskis were just trying to put as much eye candy in the movie as possible, at the expense of a tight narrative. I think a good 30 minutes could have been cut from the movie and it would have been much more tolerable, including the horrible "rave" scene.

atari2600

uh, the slo-mo parts ruled. great effect.