In honour of East Africa TV showing The Matrix over the weekend, and providing the epiphany that Joe Pantoliano absolutely owned that flick, may I present to you: Dr Oxford’s thesis on why the Matrix sucked.
The Matrix: Reconsidered, 4You’ve worked as a policeman your whole life, protecting the innocent, enforcing the law. You retire with honors, then take a job as a security guard, working the metal detector on the ground floor of a skyscraper in order to help pay for your wife’s arthritis medication. You’re sitting there, on a slow day, reading your newspaper, when a girl walks in wearing a trenchcoat. She issues no demands, no warnings, no “freeze” or “drop your gun.” She just tears you in half with a spray of machine-gun fire, then does cartwheels along the walls while killing all your friends.
Somewhere, faintly, you can hear a theater audience cheering.