Everything that is wrong with hollywood encapsulated in a movie.

Rating: 1/10 (15 April 2020)

The Terminator was brilliant. A slasher film featuring not a mask-wearing maniac, but a killing machine from the future. I still remember how shocked everyone was in 84 at the end when the metal skeleton stands up from the fire and resumes his pursuit of Sarah Connor! The movie was tight, well written, brilliant set up.
Fast forward 7 years and tons of millions of dollars in budget latter and you get this, a mess of a script covered by CGI that, while ground breaking in its day, now looks like terrible PS1 cut scenes. You know the film will suck as soon as Arnold arrives, repeats the same clothes stealing scene from the first one, but exits on riffs from "Bad to the bone"... cringe. Then, the unbearable kid is introduced and the real weakness of the script is exacerbated. While the original worked perfectly as a love story unfolding between the victim and her hero protector, under the constant looming shadow of the relentless killer in pursuit, this one waste time between uninteresting scenes with Sarah in a mental institution, idiotic "funny" scenes with her whinny sons, and scenes with Arnold who does little but stand still in a trance or shoot a gun here or there. There is at least one character too many. The mom and her kid together, or the kid and the machine together would have worked a lot better.
I remember falling asleep the first time I rented the VHS in 92 or 93. Now on blu-ray, I just stopped it watched in in 3 sessions and found it tedious to finish. You can put as many explosions and special effects as you want, this is not even 1/10th as good as the first one.