Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Ten years after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the machines from the future are again after future human leader John Connor (Nick Stahl), and they’ve sent a female android (Kristanna Loken) back to kill him. Luckily, a duplicate of the original Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is still on the job. Writers John Brancato, Michael Ferris and Tedi Sarafian and director Jonathan Mostow bring little to the series besides gender-switching the bad Terminator and adding a companion (Claire Danes) for John Connor, but they play it for laughs this time—more good laughs, in fact, than in Adam Sandler’s whole career. It’s ingeniously staged and impressively executed, but the dread of the first two films is replaced with a flippancy that drains the horror from the saga; Armageddon morphs into Dr. Strangelove.