Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

DIRECTED BY Jonathan Mostow
STARRING Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kristanna Loken, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes

“I’ll be back,” Arnold Schwarzenegger ominously declared in the original Terminator, in 1984. But had the Austrian oak been able to see the franchise’s real-life future, he might have offered the following coda: “In fact, I’ll be back in 1991 for a sequel that will become the benchmark for all other action movies. And then again in 2003 for a third film that will, um, please my bank manager and keep me out from under Maria Shriver’s feet for a few months.”

Certainly, Terminator 3 is a movie you approach with caution. Plotwise, the film picks over the two previous installments’ bones with its principal innovation — a bodacious female next-gen cyborg (Kristanna Loken) who travels back in time to “kill us all” and also kick Arnie’s leather-clad tush. This smacks a little of desperation, even if it does give Schwarzenegger the opportunity for a catchphrase revamp (“She’ll be back”).

Most worrying of all is the absence of franchise overlord James Cameron. But this is where the good news begins. For while director Jonathan Mostow’s previous film, U-571, may have been, unbelievably, a dull submarine movie, his Breakdown proved that he was more than capable of cranking up both tension and action.

Indeed, an array of stunts in T3 really do have to be seen to be believed, not least a chase sequence that finds Arnie hanging from a giant crane on wheels as it careers through — and we do mean through — a row of buildings.

Further assets include Claire Danes, gamely echoing Linda Hamilton’s what-the-frag-is-going-on? damsel-in-distress turn from the first film, and special-effects wizard Stan Winston’s batch of nightmarish death machines — including a 10-foot-tall pre-Arnie “T-1.” Add in the big man himself perfectly reprising the only role in which he’s ever really convinced, and you have a film that, if not as good as its predecessors, still leaves you hoping this isn’t the last time he fulfills his famous prediction.