Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
Written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris

If you haven't seen the previous two Terminator movies, the series tells of a ragtag band of rollerblading kids who live in the distant future, who have to save a mysterious glowing orb of energy called "The Bodhi." Hold on, that was the plot to Solarbabies. Sorry, it's hard not to get them confused.

In T3, John Connor is in his early 20s and now the robots are really trying to kill him, unlike the previous two attempts, so that he finally once and for all cannot save the human race, period. You'd think if the robots were so serious about deathing this guy, they'd send an entire robot army into the past to kill him.

Instead, they send a robot chick, prompting the requisite head-slapping, eye-rolling, "come on!" response to what was obviously a reflexive need to top the previous film. The robot chick is about 10 times more powerful than the T1000, and the Schwarzenegger robot seems about 10 times less powerful than in the previous films.

Fortunately, like all girls, the T-X (as in "totally Xtreme!") has one weakness: tampons. Yup, even robot bitches gotta use the tampons (the T-X uses tampons to hold in coolant and lubrication oil). This surreal quirk of cyborgia prompts the movie's funniest chase scene, in which the T-X chases John and Arnold into a Rite Aid and pauses in the tampon aisle, shaking her head in commiseration with a human lady when the correct type of tampon is not available.

There's one truly crazy chase scene that will prompt howls of pleased or outraged laughter, involving a construction crane, a fire truck and a thousand dune buggies, among many other destroyed vehicles. It's also pretty cool when some early-design robots start running amok near the end of the film. Robots running amok is an absolute cinematic good, and would be pretty fucking cool in real life, too.

Even the ending of the film makes perfect sense given what's come before. Granted, there's plenty of ridiculous coincidences, the kind I've taken to describing as "the Lucas" (i.e., Anakin built C3PO, Boba Fett is the clone of all the Storm Troopers, etc.): John Connor is the only man who can save the world, and he just happens to randomly meet the only girl who can grant him access to the correct military base to stop Skynet from going online, and she just happens to be … and so forth).

The acting's pretty bad, though not nearly as pathetic as Eddie Furlong's chalkboard-scratching histrionics. As for Claire Danes, the jury's hopelessly deadlocked, so a few more films are needed to decide whether to exult her or lock her in the pillory along with Winona Rider and Juliette Lewis.

T3 is in all ways about 65% of what T2 was, and as a friend said, it feels more like an episode of The Terminator TV series than a full-on movie, but it's still a very big, loud, fun action movie. Mainly, I was surprised that I did not leave the theater with a furious compulsion to shit on the faces of all involved.

Review by Crimedog