David Edelstein pans it, but also confirms my suspicions that he is a great critic. He also manages to state what was so compelling about the first one, and why repeat viewings seem to lessen the impact:
The original was, above all, an ontological mystery: How could Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) hang suspended in midair? Why did Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) know what Neo, then Thomas Anderson, was up to every second? Why did Anderson's life feel like a dream? The answers came gradually, mind-bendingly, mind-blowingly: an astute mix of everything trendy in postmodern sci-fi (Philip K. Dick and his paranoid visions of the world-as-simulation) and philosophy (Jean Baudrillard's view of the real obscured by materialism and technology), and everything up-to-the-minute in special effects and action. Most important, once Neo took the red pill, unplugged himself, and entered the virtual dojo, each fight developed his sense of who he was and what, within the Matrix, he was capable of doing; each action scene marked an ontological/metaphysical leap forward.
The suspense is gone once Neo finds his powers. I haven't seen Reloaded yet, but it appears from reviews I have read that it suffers from middle movie syndrome. The Two Towers, for example, is even less of a movie then the first Lord of the Rings, but that story isn't as dependent on special effects and pseudo-philosophy. Unlike The Matrix, it didn't have to surprise us, it just needed to move us (which it did-at least it moved me). It seems clear that Reloaded has failed to do the surprise thing in part 2, but it's still possible that part 3 has something else in store.
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