Sandwiched between my at-home viewings of Valkyrie (last week) and Defiance (this week), I went with a few of my buddies to see Christian Bale's latest franchise pic, Terminator Salvation. I expected to see the growling fury of Bale transform a reasonably cheesy franchise into something gritty and real, and I was about half right. While Terminator was a thriller back in the day, rewatching the film and its sequels makes me want to laugh, and this reboot did its best to make sure we were grime-covered in realism by the time we were done watching. And really, for all its critical shame, Terminator DOES have a story, but even that didn't quite get me where I wanted to be.

Unfortunately for Terminator Salvation, too many movies with class came first, and you'll find references to some of them peppered throughout the movie. There's a series of events in the middle of the film that echoes Steve McQueen's aerial bike move in The Great Escape... and that flashes immediately into something straight out of Apocalypse Now. There's the suspense-building beeping that seems straight ripped out of the Alien films; and the explosive finale, well, you might have just ripped that from just about anything.

Don't get me wrong, but Terminator Salvation is wildly entertaining and for moments; you forget where you are. But the teasers of Bale and his Terminator-human counterpart whet the appetite and the film doesn't quiteseal the deal. Instead, the movie flashes between excellent depictions of humanity pushed to the brink, followed by flatly translated computer-generated ideas about the future. The movie has an awesome premise, considering we know little about how the future actually played out as we watched the earlier Terminator movies; and it tries, it yearns, to be as amazing as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were in rebooting that DC legend. Ultimately, it fails. And the problem lies primarily with Bale.

I really thought that after his successes in the Batman reboot that he would knock this one out of the park. I thought that the outburst that made national news was an indication of an actor so tightly tied to a role that he lived and breathed it. But the truth is, Bale's John Connor comes across as the equivalent of a throatier, coarser Bruce Wayne who has taken up the "resistance" without dressing up in the cowl. Bale's character is so key to the Terminator saga that you'd think with his headlining status here, he'd OWN Terminator Salvation.

But the android Marcus (Sam Worthington) is incredibly more compelling. Some of that is Worthington's ability to command the camera's attention, but much of it is about the part he plays. Just to be fair, I'll assume that you've seen the movie or don't care if I give away a few of the finer plot points. Worthington's Marcus is the puppet who wishes that he was a real boy, whether you prefer the original, Pinnochio, or one of the many sci-fi hand-me-downs like A.I. Marcus longs to be human because he was once convicted for multiple murders (and executed) and has asked over and over again, of every authority figure he meets, "Do you believe people deserve a second chance?"

Continue: 1 2