Mediocre, and deliberately so...

Rating: 2/10 (19 October 2009)

I have no idea how James Cameron, assuming that he did see this, did not reach for his sleeping pills. Michael Bay & Paul Anderson are unjustly derided as the worst directors working today; none of their films, with maybe the exception of Pearl Harbor, are less than watchable. The crown must belong to Jonathan Mostow, who with this mega-abortion proves himself to be the most soulless capitalist whore of them all.
It wasn't necessary that this film had to be so abysmally bad - it could have been watchable and reasonably competent even without trying anything radical. But the brazen approach that Mostow and the producers have chosen, to rehash all and change squat, to deliberately aim for the lowest possible denominator, this is the epitome of the most abhorrent and depressing attitudes in mainstream film-making. Of course, these smug a-holes can get away with it because they know there's a ready market for car chases & special effects that don't alter from one film to the next. There's a ready crowd of idle, passive, self-professed "fans" who can be whipped into a viewing frenzy by means of bombastic advertising, plus industry-endorsed film pundits who only care about their paychecks, and nobody will be the wiser. The loser at the end of day is the average movie-goer who has no idea he has been film-flammed by marketing.
T3 takes place entirely in movieland, where nothing is real or plausible or of any consequence. Its the passive film-viewer's most delirious fantasy come alive. It has "cash-in" plastered all over it. The thing couldn't possibly get worse, till you notice that this film scores 6.7/10 at IMDb and 70% at RT. The "tongue-in-cheek" humor that everyone was clamoring about is revolting. Was that what the first two movies were about ?? Anyone who rates this higher than 1/10 deserves to have their film-viewing license revoked.