T3: RISE OF THE MACHINES

Rating: 1

Like the Energizer Bunny™, some franchises refuse to lay down and die when they should. They just keep going and going and going and going until they become unspeakably tedious, which, as you know, is three steps worse than appalling. At least with appalling, there’s emotional engagement, with TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES, there’s ennui with a dash of nostalgia.
In this installment, John Conner, whose fate it is to save the world from the machines, has grown into brooding young manhood. Living off the grid so that none of those nasty terminators can find him if they drop in from the future, he’s aimless, rootless, and very depressed. His mother, the redoubtable Sarah Conner has passed away, having fulfilled her Darwinian duty by producing John and then getting him to the desert, there to await the Judgment Day we all thought that part two had so successfully derailed.
Alas, no. For reasons that qualify at best as fuzzy logic, it’s still set to go off and to make sure that there are no hitches, those world-dominating machines of the future have sent yet another terminator (Kristanna Loken) to take out Conner (Nick Stahl) and all those who will one day be his lieutenants in the resistance. The new state-of-the-art is female and she arrives in what appears to be a mirror ball, emerging from it with long blonde hair and a body that screams “Terminator Barbie.” Unlike other terminators, who were frightening for the complete emotional detachment they demonstrated as they sliced and diced their way to fulfilling their programming, Terminator Barbie looks ticked off and just a little snooty. On the other hand, she can turn her arms into complicated weapons that spit fire and she can grow her boobs several cup sizes on demand, so the snootiness may not be entirely out of line.
The original terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course) is close on her heels, so to speak, emerging from his mirror ball in the desert. Speeding into LA in a stolen pickup, he arrives just in time to save John and his new leading lady, Kate (Claire Danes) from Terminator Barbie and speed them off to a series of high speed chases and various other assorted types of mayhem.
If only it didn’t all seem so tired. The dialogue doesn’t even try. It’s relies on camp allusions to the previous installments and moments such as Kate’s father telling her that he’s glad he doesn’t have to worry about her, after which you know two things. She’s going to need a lot of worrying over and this script would have flunked scriptwriting 101. Writing, though, may not be a priority when the action sequences constitute the bulk of the film. They have a perfunctory air, and while many things are blown up — police cars, fire trucks, strip malls — explosions are piled on explosions as though in an attempt to perk things up with pyrotechnic distractions rather than come up with something novel. When all else fails, a helicopter is crashed into a scene. And then another. There is nothing quite as good as in T2. While Robert Patrick’s incarnation did that cool thing of chasing down a car and then sinking his hooks into it, literally, Terminator Barbie chases down a hearse, leaps on it and then rips into it as though it were a can of sardines. Ho hum. Sure she turns into liquid silver, but reconstitute herself from a checkerboard tile floor? Nope. All she’s got in the way of dazzle are those expanding boobs.
Stahl does a fine job of brooding. Danes, whose character started the day as a vet curing kitties of their hairballs and ends it as the mother of the revolution, looks properly askance. They both emote on cue and hit their marks. Arnold, however, looks a little sad this time out. There’s a hint of melancholy to his Terminator, or maybe I’m projecting my own disappointment in him having gone one sequel to far.
And a final note, while the first two Terminators had a subtext dealing with the triumph of free will, this one is based on the sort of predestination that the Puritans fervently believed in and was probably no small part of the reason for their generally sour outlook on life. That’s bad enough. Worse is that the ending leaves no doubt that the perpetrators of this stale bit of cinema plan on trotting out the terminator at least one more time.