Since audiences loved Arnie's gag lines, everything he says here has some double meaning or back-reference to spur a cheap laugh. T3 can't punch in that league, and sometimes verges on parody of its earlier instalments - Schwarzenegger struts nude into a redneck bar to be mistaken for a stripper by a raucous hen night, then cops his familiar threads from a gay dancer (whose star-spangled shades are ditched in favour of something cooler.
And yet, T3 does what it does with machine-like efficiency.Ĭameron's films were ground-breaking melds of action, effects and time-trickery - signature films of the '80s and the '90s, the ruthlessness of the first softened by the reworking of Arnie's cyborg killing machine as a good-guy protector of children in the second. Schwarzenegger's admission that the sleek, blonde T-X is far superior to his T-101 because he is "an obsolete model" has a certain extra-filmic poignancy given that the former box office champ has been on a slide since, well, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.Īlso, the CGI that made the first Terminator sequel such a revelation a decade back can now be approximated by kids with home computers, suggesting this franchise might fall prey to its own nightmare vision and be rendered extinct through mushroom-growth technological progress. Sarah Connor is dead, signalling Linda Hamilton's departure, and leaving Nick Stahl's jittery John Connor and Claire Danes as his bewildered, predestined wife to shoulder the human side of things. James Cameron is gone, and Jonathan Mostow ( Breakdown) is ringmastering the stuntwork.