Assymilator nailed it. Listen to Ebert, The Fat One is never wrong...
I liked the movie, though there's no doubt in my mind that despite the fact that the visuals are an order of magnitude better from one movie to the next, the story suffers from too many characters and muddled psychology, and not as much story as some would like. It's almost like there wasn't enough story for 3 movies, but there was too much background to cram into ONLY 3 movies. An odd paradox. :edit: I guess if you play the game and watch Animatrix it really helps expand the story, esp. with regards to the Kid, Niobe and Ghost, and what happened to the Oracle. But others like the Trainman and Kamarama whatever his name was, were introduced way too late and woefully underdeveloped to make me care about their contribution to the mythos.
The only REAL problem with the sequels is that the open end of the first movie let us imagine. We got to imagine for ourselves what Zion was like, how Neo would save humanity, what cool new powers our heroes would learn as time went on, etc etc etc. With that standard to measure against, the movies are almost sure to disappoint most viewers, no matter what vision the W Brothers could create for the Matrix universe.