Had the misfortune of having to live up to it's predecessors' impossibly high standards

Rating: 5/10 (4 July 2010)

Standards which it could never achieve, and wasn't really meant to anyways. As a brainless action flick, it's very well made. The crane chase, no matter how implausible, was amazing and is easily one of the best chase scenes of the decade. The film's main problem, for me at least, is that it spends it's best action scene too early on in the film, and everything that came afterwards was just OK. Still, it's a good action film, and I believe people have come to respect it more after witnessing the travesty that was Terminator Salvation. Just don't go mentioning T3 in the same breath as it's predecessors.
PROS:
-Crane chase, crane chase, crane chase! Brilliantly set up and shot, and incredibly thrilling. This is the one point where T3 almost matches the heights of the first two films, and what it SHOULD be remembered for. Yes, it is highly implausible, but that's not the point.
-Arnold is amusing, almost playing a parody version of his previous Terminator roles. You can tell he had fun.
-Kristanna Loken makes for a good villainess. She doesn't even touch Robert Patrick, but she brings enough menace to the table to actually feel like a reasonable threat.
-Ending. I'm not gonna spoil it but it is fittingly dark. Gotta give the director props for not coping out on it.
CONS:
-Nick Stahl. Dull. Flat. Boring
-Claire Danes. Dull. Flat. Boring
-The scale/size and quality of the action scenes following the crane chase took a big nose-dive. They are OK, but that's just it. Only OK does not pass in a Terminator film. I get the feeling that most of the film's budget went towards the crane chase, as everything else feels lackluster by comparison.
-This is the biggest flaw for me. The musical score. Where in the hell did that AMAZING and GOD-LIKE score from T2 go? No, those are not overstatements. T2 literally had one of the greatest scores in film history (Brad Fiedel's masterpiece), and I'm just dumbfounded that the creators of T3 seemed completely oblivious to this fact, because T3 has an almost non-existent score. What actually is there is very flat, dull, and BORING. Why oh why did they not try harder in this department?
In closing, Terminator 3 would have gotten MUCH more praise had it not been a Terminator film. 7/10 for this entertaining blockbuster.