"No, Not the Mind Probe!!?!"

Quite right about the third one...I really like the first one, even if I acknowledge that a lot of what I like about it just appeals to my adolescent liking for explosions and shootouts and people doing kung fu to each other. I agree with your misgivings; it's the old action movie thing, isn't it - the guards/employees sitting around having their coffee break, little suspecting that certain death in the form of Our Heroes is approaching...How do we know they're Our Heroes? Well, it's in the script. I like the first Austin Powers movie's take on this, where it cuts from some guard meeting a nasty end to his friends/family receiving the bad news ("he was decapitated by a mutated sea bass?!"). Morpheus and his gang were really just another faction of violent revolutionaries, caring little for how many dead bodies they had to climb over to realise their cause.