Sharp clothes, cool shades, flaky philosophy, mind-bending, digitally enhanced action, fetishized violence-in short, all the things people loved The Matrix for-are back in spades in The Matrix Reloaded. Having already made more than $150 million at the North American box office, it seems fans of the first are embracing the second, even if the plot is completely unintelligible (a groovy Monsignor's outfit-what Keanu appears to be wearing throughout the film-to the first person who can tell me just what the hell it was all about).

Like Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Matrix Reloaded is the bridge between the admittedly very entertaining first installment in the trilogy and the pull-out-all-the-stops finale. Kicking off explosively (literally), The Matrix Reloaded combines some character development-Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Vancouverite Carrie-Anne Moss) are, no surprise, now deeply in love; Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) must deal with many fellow revolutionaries who think his prophecies are a bunch of hooey-with the requisite action set-pieces taken to new lengths of visual spectacle.

The story? The machines-250,000 of them-are burrowing down to the centre of the Earth where the humans have their city of Zion. Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and co. have 72 hours to prevent the end of the human race. Voila, the stage is set for some serious carnage.

And it is pretty impressive carnage. Neo's fight with literally hundreds of Smiths (Hugo Weaving) attains a level of digital excess so extreme as to be almost abstract while an extended car-chase scene that goes on far too long does provoke gasps of the "How the hell did they do that?" kind.

All to be expected by fans of the first film, of course. The surprise is the self-deprecating humour sprinkled throughout the proceedings. Jokes abound and a confrontation between Neo and his gang with the oily Merovingian and his wife (played beautifully by French icons Lambert Wilson and Monica Bellucci) leads to a Merovingian monologue about how "swearing in French is like wiping my ass with silk-I love it!" Writer-directors the Wachowski brothers have smartly realized that to take things completely seriously would risk limiting their audience solely to die-hard fans of the first installment, many of whom bought the first-year-university-student-who-just-smoked-his-first-joint baloney about Messiahs, free will versus predetermined fate, etc.

For film buffs, another unexpected pleasure is the frequent references to other sci-fi films. Alien, Minority Report, Metropolis, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are just a few of the films referred to. I admit I am looking forward to installment three.