Silly and Monotonous

Rating: 4/10 (2 July 2003)

First off I must confess that I'm not a member of the church of Terminator. I was 5 years old when T2 came out and I missed out on all the hype and excitement surrounding its release. The first time I saw T2 was right before watching T3; I had seen the first movie before. On DVD and 12 years separated from the hype, T2 is a decent action movie but nothing more; I found James Cameron's attempts at creating human drama to be just as laughable as they were in Titanic. Because I wasn't really anticipating this movie, it wasn't a big deal to me when it turned out to be a dud (especially considering I got in free thanks to an employee friend's passes). If you are a fanboy, brace yourself; I haven't seen anything quite so hilarious and sad for quite some time as the shell-shocked, horrified look on the face of a man in the row behind me at the end of the movie; as everyone filed out, he stayed glued to his seat, his mouth slightly open, staring transfixed at the screen like it was some horrible train-wreck. I have a creeping suspicion he was praying for Ashton Kutcher to appear and scream "YOU'VE BEEN PUNK'D BY THE PUNKERS ON MTV'S PUNK'D, PUNK!"
Before 1999, action movies were about big, brutal fights and explosions. On March 31, 1999, The Matrix slipped quietly into theaters and we all know what happened next. For better or for worse, T3 is a throwback film of sorts. There is, as in Matrix Reloaded, one huge car-chase set piece; it plays out more like director Jonathan Mostow challenging himself to see how much of the ridiculous $170 million budget he can spend blowing things up and knocking things over in a couple minutes, all while shaking the camera around and cutting quickly enough that you have only a faint inkling of what's going on. All the movie's action sequences play out like this; yes, the explosions are big, but none of it is terribly interesting or creative.
I'm not going to bother with the plot, which serves as a vehicle for 1) the effects and 2) the setup for a couple more of these movies than a story in its own right. What some will inevitably call a daring and imaginate shakeup of the Terminator mythos is more a necessarily overcomplex way to milk an artificial conflict out of a storyline that was concluded 12 years ago.
This is a franchise exercise and a calculated move, not a film. If that doesn't dissuade you from seeing it, since 90% of Hollywood's movies are that way, hopefully the fact that it's a bad one will.