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In order to make a third "Terminator" movie, somebody somewhere must have proclaimed these four vital words: "We need bigger trucks."
The first chase scene in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" is all about bruiser vehicles. There's a racing fire engine that's almost as menacing as the big-wheel tankers used in the earlier films. But then big momma rolls up.
It's a 100-ton construction crane on wheels, and, manned by the series' new, curvy, all-woman robotic killer, it's prone to wiping out everything in its path, such as parked cars, telephone poles and the gigantic glass facade of a multi-story building.
"T3," you see, is basically a big-screen version of "World's Scariest Police Chases." It's a big, big-budget ($170 million-plus), watchable, electronic circuit-crusher of a movie. Unfortunately, it also fails on nearly every level to live up to "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."
In a summer full of action movies that don't quite match their hype, this latest "Terminator" is like "The Godfather, Part III." It would have been nice, you know, if it had worked, but you'd really rather they hadn't even tried.
Yes, there's plenty of testosterone. There's that long, speed-demon chase with the hefty crane, a blistering pedal-to-the-metal ride in a hearse and a knockout cyborg-vs.-cyborg brawl that makes mincemeat of a marble-and-steel bathroom. And when have you ever seen somebody like actor (and maybe even California gubernatorial candidate) Arnold Schwarzenegger yank a urinal out of a wall and use it to club his attacker in the face.
Most of the time, though, "T3" seems like a miscalculated remake of "T2." The story lines are quite similar. As the nude-arriving Terminator, Schwarzenegger takes clothes from a big guy at a bar. He favors sunglasses. Later, he nabs a motorcycle. And, as our search-and-destroy robot, Kristanna Loken seems to take her cues from Robert Patrick, who played the ever-charging, ever-mutating T-1000 in the first sequel. In a rather static performance, Loken puts her chin down, focuses her eyes forward and just moves.
The plot contains very little new material. This film is about 22-year-old John Connor (Nick Stahl), humanity's only hope in the future when machines wage war against humans. He meets up with his eventual mate (Claire Danes). They're chased by a robot sent back from the future by machines to ice Connor and a bunch of his future lieutenants. Schwarzenegger's slightly altered Terminator (he's now a T-850) is sent back by humans from the future to protect them. There's a lot of hand-wringing over SkyNet, the controlling computer program that's more a menace to humans than they realize. And, way too often, there are remembrances, sight gags and outright steals from the first two movies.
As the human principals, Stahl and Danes do little more than make you miss the T-movies' Earth mother, Linda Hamilton. Stahl's Connor, especially, is written as a would-be quitter.
Clearly, this movie would have been nothing without Schwarzenegger (he even gave back $1.4 million of his $30 million paycheck just so the glass front of that building could be destroyed). His Terminator talks more than ever. And while that's not always necessarily a good thing, it does interject this film with a good dose of humor. It's a nice twist, for example, that his robot is also programmed as a psychotherapist.
Writer-director James Cameron, who expertly fashioned the first two "Terminator" movies and co-created the characters, had nothing to do with "T3."
You can tell. The first two conveyed a clear understanding of pacing (Cameron may be the best in the business at mixing slow motion with normal movement), timing of humor and editing.
"T3's" first chase proves that director Jonathan Mostow, who helmed the loud but limp "U-571" and the unintentionally campy "Breakdown," is out of his league. This movie is a mishmash of flying debris, giant collisions, improbable maneuvers and crushed telephone poles. It's loud, it's brutal, but it's never an effective symphonic orchestration of destruction |
