YOU have to do something quite spectacular to impress several thousand hungover critics at 8.30am. The international premiere of The Matrix Reloaded did so much more.

The special effects drew gasps of disbelief. The kinky costumes turned stony cynics into cackling schoolboys. And the fight sequences won spontaneous rounds of applause.

No wonder Keanu Reeves was moved to stick his hand in his pocket and buy a brand new Harley Davidson for every member of his stunt crew. Their charming knack of planting their faces in the way of his flying boot has made Reeves the action hero of the hour, if not the year.

News of the first resounding smash of the festival has an instant impact on the Croisette. By lunchtime hundreds of fans are staking places outside the Festival Palais for the star-studded evening gala. At 3pm there isn’t room to sneeze. Reeves has lifted the gloom. He has grabbed the world’s most prestigious art-house festival by the throat and he’s loving the irony.

His riotous reception is every bit as far-fetched as the Wachowski brothers’ film. Fears about their ability to shoot a sequel to top the sci-fi thrills of The Matrix are now dust. At the bar in the Petit Majestic, the critics are going nuts about the technical wizardry.

But I’m yet to meet the Einstein who can fathom the futuristic plot. To bring you up to speed: machines have taken over the planet, human beings are grown in pods as an energy source and their brains are wired to a computer simulated fantasy called the Matrix.

The clever bit is that in their minds, these comatose human beings live, eat stale sandwiches and catch the number 19 bus to the office in a virtual world every bit as dismally familiar as our own.

The virtual truth is that we are strings of green digits on someone’s Apple Mac. I suspected as much, which is half the fun of the film. There is something wonderfully convenient about pinning the blame for losing the car keys on a deranged computer.

It’s up to Reeves and a chic army of human survivors to unplug us from this ghastly hell and lead us in triumph to the city of Zion. Which is, I have to say, not the local vicar’s idea of the promised land. The rebel kingdom is three miles under ground and it looks as if it was nailed together out of discarded ventilation units and old bits of submarine.

Armed with snappy sunglasses, pitch-black trenchcoats and state-of-the-art handguns, Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss kick seven bells out of an army of sinister Hugo Weaving clones. Their martial arts skills are otherworldly. The Zen-like beauty of the violence is hypnotic. Blinding speed and miraculous agility are lovingly framed by slow-motion action sequences that capture the trajectory of bullets. It’s almost religious. Which is the deep point of the film. This fight for survival against computer-generated spooks and demented stainless-steel Hoovers exerts a Biblical grip on the imagination.

In Reloaded the robots are tunnelling their way through iron ore to reach Zion and 250,000 twitchy metal octopuses are squirming with psychotic anticipation. Reeves and his trusty cohorts have to surf the Matrix for clues on how to save a rainbow tribe of shapely extras. To discover if the extermination of man is predestined, or open to choice, Reeves must find the maker of the Matrix — and time is never on a hero’s side.

Fishburne’s Morpheus, a burly John the Baptist prophet, talks about destiny as if it were a GCE maths question. He is Spock to Reeves’s Captain Kirk. His evangelical belief that Reeves’s Neo is the “chosen one” with the Christ-like power to save mankind from the machines drives the film. The key to salvation lies somewhere inside the Matrix. And for reasons yet to be revealed (the final part of the trilogy is due out in November), only Neo can fetch it.

“I wish I knew what I was supposed to do,” Reeves complains at one point. Who cares? His fabulous gifts are a pair of Y-fronts short of Superman’s. His fight scenes are probably the best and most demanding ever filmed.

Cannes has never been more enamoured of so much fantastic froth.

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