WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE.('The Matrix Revolutions,' 'Veronica Guerin' and 'Beyond Borders')(Movie Review)

"Not much philosophy there," a real-world philosopher, Colin McGinn, of Rutgers, said to me after a screening of "The Matrix Revolutions" last week. I hasten to add that my own unphilosophical temperament found the picture somewhat more entertaining than the second movie in the series, "The Matrix Reloaded," a noisy sleeping potion administered to the world last spring. But McGinn is right: this time, as in the second movie, the directors Larry and Andy Wachowski have made the intricacies of the original "Matrix" (the play between actual and simulated reality?) secondary to the main events of spectacle, fighting, and stunningly wooden dialogue. At its best, the picture is violently exciting; at its worst, banal and monotonous. Yet the relative absence of mighty significances did not prevent the Matricians sitting all around me--mostly men aged about thirty--from remaining utterly still, as if at a High Mass, throughout the movie. It is, I suppose, far too late to bemoan the obvious truth that these college-educated gents, and millions of others like them, will spend many hours debating the apocalypse as revealed by the Brothers Wachowski but would die before reading a single story by Chekhov or Cheever dealing with the sensual and spiritual quandaries of ordinary people. American men enjoy violent entertainments, and an aureole of religious or speculative mystification …