The Terminator at 55

The robot-crushes-man franchise shows its age.

Not quite terminated: The big guy is back




But the biggest change—apart from the finale—is that the latest model Terminator, the TX, is a fembot (Kristanna Loken) that can morph into other people, plug into machines and make them do her bidding, and use her hand like a laser cannon. Loken is a persuasive android (she can throw people around without altering her expression), but she isn’t as much fun as T2’s Robert Patrick, who had a sort of newly hatched blankness, with stuck-out ears that gave him the look of an especially willful 5-year-old. The joke was that Cameron had found someone smugger and blanker than Schwarzenegger. The joke here, if you can call it that, is watching Arnold bash a pretty blonde’s head through a urinal to no visible effect.

The audience awaits the arrival of the big guy, and I must say: With 40-year-old Demi Moore going bod-to-bod with Cameron Diaz in a bikini in the terrible new Charlie’s Angels picture, and the 55-year-old Schwarzenegger showing off his rock-hard gluteals, it’s been a banner year for personal trainers and plastic surgeons. Schwarzenegger gets to total cars and deliver deadpan understatements like “We need a new vehicle,” and he’s constantly in search of the right pair of shades. He has an absurdist comeback in one scene: “Talk to the hand.” But he’s not the same lovable robot from T2. He has a different origin, a different history, and a different agenda. Has John found another surrogate dad, or is there something different about this Terminator?

Three quarters of T3 consists of the heroes being chased in cars, SUVs, fire trucks, helicopters—and what is there to say? Mostow and his team do a fine job of demolishing vehicles, trashing buildings, and blowing things up real good. Virtually indestructible machines throw each other through walls and get up and do it again—and again. The villain comes back more times than Wile E. Coyote. I found it tiresome and witless and numbingly repetitive, but action mavens won’t feel cheated. And it’s probably good that there isn’t much dialogue since what’s there is largely tin-eared. Stahl does well by John: He’s wiry but depressive, overly defended but touchingly vulnerable. Danes, however, is shrill and painful to watch. She looked adorable and sexy with a touch of baby fat, but she’s the latest in an endless line of young Hollywood actresses to starve herself down to the bone. Stop the madness!

Speaking of madness … T3 has a climactic plot twist that should not be revealed but can’t be ignored, either. Let’s just say that this is the rare sequel that both slavishly duplicates its predecessors and at the same time demolishes their philosophical underpinnings. I’m sure Cameron did quite nicely selling off the rights to his characters, but I wonder if he isn’t mightily pissed off at the grotesquely opportunistic direction that the new movie takes. What does it profit a filmmaker to gain a sequel but lose the world? A few hundred million, apparently.