Schwarzenegger And The Franchise Deserve Better Than This

Rating: 6/10 (25 July 2016)

Continuing my plan to watch every movie in Arnold Schwarzenegger's filmography in order, I come to Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines.
Plot In A Paragraph: John Connor is living off the grid, but a new advanced Terminator, is sent back to change the past once more. Luckily the humans had also sent a bodyguard back again too.
Where to start......
In basically a retread of T2, there were scenes of violence and action, with some dreary talk in between. Everything was just so Bland and uninteresting. The Terminator franchise was officially becoming a bore.
First of all, the writers of the movie didn't even like Terminator movies and admittedly took the job just for the money. In his own blog, John Brancato says he and Ferris took the job because Ferris wanted a new house. Why Jonathan Mostow (another with no respect for the source material or the franchise) was given the job of directing is anybody's guess, but Arnie had approval, in his mega 33 page contract written by a super Hollywood lawyer.
Arnie's Terminator is a joke right from his first scene, it's almost a parody!! A total disgrace. John Connor is an incompetent fool, and the way the T-X goes around taking down her victims is ludicrous. Take the drive thru guy for example. She not only knew he was working that night, but also that he was serving at the drive thru?? PLEASE!! Considering she can change her appearance, she only does so once. Also considering this is time travel, why didn't Skynet, give her more than a few hours to try and kill 22 targets?? Even if they were all in L.A. The full thing is just full of holes!! The lack of respect for the franchise is apparent, and if the writers and director didn't care, why should the audience??
The ending saved it a little bit, but not enough to redeem everything that came before it.
Arnie, wooden as an old oak beam, looks as if he were desperately wishing he was somewhere else. His performance here is miles away from the first two, and for the first time, I'm going to say he phones it in.
12 years ago, thanks to T2, he was the world's No 1 action Star. He not only laughed all the way to the bank... He bought it. But what of Schwarzenegger now. Nothing had come up trumps since Eraser 7 years ago..... There is nothing he can do, and he does very little. Throughout the whole affair he looks old, tired and bored.
Audiences still lapped up Terminator 3, to the tune of a $150 million domestic gross, making it the 8th highest grossing movie of the year.
I'm torn between a 5 or 6/10 on this one. It's certainly better than his last three movies, but it's an awful Terminator movie.