Baz Luhrmann’s Creativity Does Not Diminish William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet The Way His Direction Does!

The Good: Great story, Decent chemistry, Most of the acting, Moments of direction
The Bad: Most of the direction
The Basics: A modern recasting of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is creative and accurate, but unfortunately cut more often than not.


Tonight, perusing my wife’s DVD collection for a new (to me) film to watch, I came upon William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. My wife enthusiastically urged me to put in the film and I was in a Shakespeare mood, so I eagerly complied. Generally, I am glad I did.

That said, I have no inherent issue with modern interpretations of Shakespeare, but Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet does not quite land it for me the way it does for my wife. In the case of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, all that really has been changed is that the film is set in modern Verona Beach and a few contemporary songs have been thrown in. The language is Shakespeare’s (for the most part) and the story is the classic Shakespeare play adapted to use the full scope of the screen well. Unfortunately, the directing is erratic at best and some of the acting is not all it ought to be.

In Verona Beach, the Montagues and the Capulets are warring families, gangs essentially. After a fight at a gas station, Benvolio reports back to the head of the Montague family, who is preoccupied with thoughts of his son, Romeo. Romeo, brooding young man that he is, is not eager to engage in the family war and is actually more interested in love. When Mercutio invites Romeo to a Capulet-thrown party, he goes, but without any real enthusiasm. At the party, however, he falls in love with Juliet upon first gazing upon her (through an aquarium) and she is taken with him, despite her mother trying to set him up with Dave Paris.

Following the party, Romeo and Juliet reunite, flirt, and confirm their love for one another. After a secret wedding, a fight breaks out in which Mercutio is killed and in anger, after being much provoked, Romeo kills Tybalt. This earns Romeo banishment from Verona Beach and with him gone, Juliet’s mother pushes her to marry Paris. But with the help of Juliet’s nurse and Father Laurence, Romeo and Juliet make plans to reunite and run away together, before all those plans lead to inevitable tragedy.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is not Franco Zeffirelli’s interpretation of Romeo And Juliet (that was the cinematic version of the story I was raised on and remains a pretty true – literal – interpretation of Shakespeare’s play) and for all the risks it takes – with guns and street fighting – it is pretty tame. In fact, there are only two real strikes against it.

The first is Baz Luhrmann’s direction. The creativity – Mercutio in drag is fine, using televisions for the narrators, etc. – is enviable, though the color palate in the first half of the film is garish. Baz Luhrmann is creative and the creativity stands on its own, for the most part. The issue, though, is with the direction. Luhrmann has created an erratic film. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet starts lit in bright colors, flamboyant and comical performances, and cuts made so manically that it is almost nauseating. The moment Romeo and Juliet spy one another through the fish tank, the film’s direction changes. The cuts are – blissfully – more static from that point on, the exception being the fight sequence that costs Mercutio his life. The film is still artful, but it looks much more professional and does not rely upon the shock of “modernized Shakespeare” the way the opening half does. Luhrmann also appears to think his audience is idiotic in that he repeats sections, most notably the opening monologue, multiple times as if it were not clear by the words and images he puts on screen.

The only other issue is with the performance of Claire Danes. Danes has been fabulous in each and every other thing I have seen her in, but in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet she is more often than not stiff or tentative and she stood out at several key moments, especially when playing off Miriam Margolyes (the Nurse). That said, she and Leonardo DiCaprio (Romeo) have great on-screen chemistry. From the moment they first appear on screen together, their chemistry is entirely convincing and enjoyable to watch. They portray young love perfectly.

On DVD, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet features a commentary track and galleries of production artwork. There are also music videos for some of the music works in the film. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is good, but not extraordinary; it takes the incredible poetic lines of Shakespeare and assembles them in an erratically-executed fashion.

For other films based on (or about) Shakespeare’s works, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Hamlet
O
Shakespeare In Love

6/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Too Long To Go For Too Little On A Movie I Wanted To Like: Shopgirl

The Good: All-around good acting, The last lines, Nice direction
The Bad: Terrible characters, Pacing, Overbearing music, Problematic plot
The Basics: In a terrible disappointment, Steve Martin's Shopgirl presents characters who make no sense behaving in a way that is only limited by the conventions of cinematic expectations.


Ever since I read one of Steve Martin's short stories in The New Yorker (reviewed here!), I've had respect for him as a writer and as an artist that I did not have from prior works of his (like The Three Amigos). I liked the improbable film A Simple Twist Of Fate (reviewed here!) in which he was stellar. So, when Shopgirl was released, I was excited, even though I had not read the book. The reviews were mixed and I finally got the chance to see the movie on DVD.

The short of it, and for a change I will be succinct in a review, is that Shopgirl is hugely disappointing. The movie wanders around aimlessly without giving any of the characters enough for us to believe in until Martin's character Ray Porter utters the final lines of the movie. By that point, we simply do not care. By that point, we need Porter to tell us the point because it has not been shown throughout the movie.

Shopgirl tells the story of Mirabelle Buttersfield who is bored working at Saks Fifth Avenue and so she goes on a date with the disheveled Jeremy who is utterly repulsive. This does not stop her from having sex with him, though. Mirabelle is then wooed by the refined Ray Porter who is pretty much the opposite of Jeremy. They date for a considerable time, though when we see them together they seem quite happy and connected, though privately - outside the first morning after they have spent the night together - Ray tells others he is not taking the relationship seriously. Mirabelle and Ray do a great deal together, both romantic and real (he helps her to the doctor's when she goes off her antidepressants), but that does not stop him from having sex with another woman.

The bottom line here is that the movie does not work. We never understand Ray because he's pretty incomprehensible. Near the end of the movie, Mirabelle asks the essential question that we have to wonder why she is asking based on what we see. That is to say, based on what the movie shows the viewer, the couple is doing generally well and seems serious and Ray seems quite into Mirabelle. Apparently, though, he is not and Mirabelle confronts him on that. So all the real character conflict is told to the viewer.

Add to that the pacing is way off. Jeremy leaves for much of the movie and when he returns, the viewer is buggered to figure out why Mirabelle gives him a second chance. And, terribly, his transformation in the film only makes him take on the more material characteristics of Ray, which gives a horrible message. The movie gets slow in parts and the music swells and dominates, as if to attempt to cover a lack of movement.

In fact, all that truly works is the acting. Jason Schwartzman is great as Jeremy. He begins the movie as so thoroughly unlikable I found it agonizing to watch. Steve Martin is suave and sophisticated as Ray Porter. He seems quite comfortable in the role, which makes sense given that he wrote it. But again, he does not show us so much of the character, instead he tells us with his monologues. Which begs the question, why doesn't Mirabelle have voice-overs or why isn't the movie called "Observations of a Mature Emotophile?"

Claire Danes is given the task, then, of saving the film from the title role. Unfortunately, even the talented Danes (who I'm only just now realizing I've only seen previously in Terminator 3) can't save this piece. She is given the task of playing a character who makes no sense and who ultimately is unsympathetic because she appears to live by a simple, deeply flawed truth: there are only two choices before her, therefor there are only two choices.

Mirabelle is only forced to live in the conceit that she must choose between Jeremy and Ray in Shopgirl because it is what is expected. I hoped the film would end - at least a half hour earlier - with her declaring that there were more choices out there and she was going to explore them because she shouldn't have to choose between a man who cannot seem to love her (we are told) and a man who is quite possibly deranged.

This movie, sad to say, is not worth your time. If you want better Steve Martin, watch Simple Twist of Fate. If you want a better romantic story, there's When Harry Met Sally. You might need both to get the taste of this one out of your mouth.

For other works with Jason Schwartzman, be sure to visit my reviews of:
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Darjeeling Limited
Marie Antoinette
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Rushmore

3.5/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2006 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Turnaround on U Turn, Oliver Stone's Directing School Art Project

The Good: Some decent acting, Moments of character/intrigue
The Bad: Stone's directoral toying, Terrible characters, Feels long
The Basics: With violent, mean and unredeemably bad characters, U Turn tells a story of a man trapped in a backwater town that Oliver Stone sloppily creates.


When I was in college, possibly when I saw The Usual Suspects (reviewed here!) in the theater, I saw a preview for Oliver Stone's U Turn. Ever since then, it has been on my list to see and I was thrilled to find it on DVD (albeit a no-frills version) and I was excited to sit down and watch this movie. If anything, I was biased toward it from the previews I barely remembered. As the movie stretched on and on, the anticipation faded and the reality sunk in; there's a reason U Turn is almost never mentioned with Stone's classic works JFK and Natural Born Killers.

Bobby Cooper is driving through Arizona en route to paying off a gambling debt that has already cost him two fingers when the radiator tube in his car's engine ruptures and he is forced to get it repaired. In the desert, he finds the small town of Superior and a crazy hick mechanic named Darrell. While Darrell is repairing Bobby's car, he goes into the town where he encounters Grace. Grace is nice enough, recognizes his flirting and brings him back to her house. Bobby is attacked by her husband, Jake, who then approaches Bobby with a proposition; he'll give him money to kill Grace, a proposition Bobby rejects. Unfortunately for Bobby, he's at the site of a stick-up and the money he's carrying to pay off his debts gets shot up by a store owner who kills the robbers. As Bobby is tossed between Darrell and a psychopath named TNT, attracted to Grace and avoiding the law in the form of Sheriff Potter, he finds himself desperate to get out of Superior and in need of money he does not have.

U Turn has a number of elements that seem to set it up for greatness. It has a respected director (Oliver Stone), it has a decent cast that includes Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez (remember when she was primarily an actress?), and Billy Bob Thornton. It has characters that are, at the very least, intriguing. It even has some truly brilliant lines. The problem is, almost none of them all come together at the same time.

Possibly the best moment - and this is in the trailer, so it's not revealing anything too big - is when Bobby, played perfectly in the scene by Sean Penn, turns to Darrell - played with gruesome perversity by Billy Bob Thornton - and with uncharacteristic wit says, "Forty thousand people die each day, how come you're not one of them?" Now that's an insult! Penn delivers the line well, to the right character at the right moment. It's a nice moment of cinematic quality that is not necessarily indicative of the rest of the film.

Bobby owes people money and they've lopped off some of his fingers so from the moment Bobby comes into the picture, the viewer knows we're not dealing with the morally upstanding citizens of the world. Writer John Ridley does not keep the viewer waiting long, with Darrell being the first character the very impatient Bobby encounters. Whatever sympathy we have for Darrell who is immediately insulted by Bobby, fades with his shifty ways and underlying meanness (to say nothing of his rotted smile).

In short, U Turn features a cast of almost entirely unlikable characters. Superior, Arizona is populated by rogues, killers and psychopaths who bully, bribe and sex their ways through life. And it gets old pretty quick. Unlike a movie like Payback (reviewed here!) where the viewer roots for the antihero because they have been, in some way, wronged and has some redeeming quality to them, U Turn has no such luck.

Throughout this movie, characters tell Bobby that they see within him the killer instinct, the ability to kill, something he claims he has never done before arriving at Superior. The thing is, whether they see it or not, Bobby's sense of desperation leads him to exercise what he's never seen within him before. It's that kind of weak characterization where there's no integrity that turns the viewer off to empathizing with him. Instead, the viewer shrugs and says, "Don't care what's coming to him now."

Even the abused Grace has moments where the viewer thinks her character might be redeemable. Alas, Ridley and director Oliver Stone mortgage that by making Grace even more shifty than her abusive husband Jake. To his credit, Stone chose well to cast Jennifer Lopez as Grace and Nick Nolte as Jake. Nolte is appropriately menacing as Jake and almost every moment he's on screen makes the viewer's skin crawl. Similarly, Powers Boothe is decent as Sheriff Potter.

What's unredeemable is Stone's directing. Stone plays with the camera like a film school student, cheapening almost every vital moment of the film by using camera techniques. A good (or great) director figures out how to use the medium to effectively tell the story they want. While I applaud experimentation, Stone's camera experiments fail to illuminate the story or more importantly the characters in U Turn. Instead, the abrupt clips are distracting, sloppy and annoying.

Whatever potential the rogues gallery of U Turn had of surviving the unlikability of the characters and the somewhat predictable (or standard) criminal underworld plot is mortgaged by Stone's direction which sinks this film out of being watchable. At least now, it's off my list. If it's on yours, you might want to take it off before you, too, are disappointed.

For other works by Oliver Stone, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Platoon
Wall Street
W.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

4/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Kissing The Stone Of Mediocrity: The Family Stone

The Good: Decent acting, Fair plot
The Bad: Unlikable or inconsistent characters, Builds too much on unpleasantness before getting good
The Basics: When the Stone Family reunites, it is an annoying girlfriend to one of the sons that dominates the story and ruins the experience for family and viewer alike.


I cannot remember the last time a movie had an emotional resonance with me, where it succeeded in bringing a tear to my eye at moments, that I did not then recommend. Ultimately, and I suppose to skip to the end, The Family Stone is not a movie I'm willing to recommend because by the time it gets to the deeply emotional stuff, it has mortgaged its enjoyability. That is to say, by the time the story tells us to care about the characters, we already do not. And what is most likely to bring a tear to one's eyes is obvious. Writer/director Thomas Bezucha goes for the obvious tear-jerker moments, so the viewer is more likely to feel manipulated at the conclusion to the movie than satisfied.

The Stone family is getting together for Christmas. This year, Everett is bringing his new girlfriend, Meredith Morton, home with him. She is uptight, somewhat obnoxious and pretty glued to her cellphone. She has trouble unwinding, insists on sleeping apart from Everett and feels pressure to fit in with his family.

The family, diverse to the point of cliche, is setup to not like her, though patriarch Kelly insists they give her a fair chance. Sybil, the matriarch, is feeling anxiety over her suspicion that Everett is going to ask her for a promised ring to propose to Meredith. Everett is, in fact, prepared to propose to Meredith and finds himself in conflict with his family over his choice of spouse. Younger sister Amy is feeling persecuted and put out by Meredith, Ben is giving everyone a chance, deaf son Thad and his Black gay partner Patrick are planning to adopt and see this as a chance to be with their family to float the idea and Susannah - with her daughter - is waiting for her absent husband to show up for the holiday.

The problem here is twofold. The first problem is Meredith. While actress Sarah Jessica Parker does not get top billing for The Family Stone, Meredith is the central character during the first half of the movie. And she's unlikable. We're not supposed to like her. Bezucha sees to that. From the first moment she appears on screen talking incessantly into her cell phone, Meredith is portrayed as an uptight pain in the butt. In her first scene with Everett, his action is to simply take away her cell phone and close it, undermining any insinuation of chemistry between the pair. Meredith is unlikable and she is supposed to be. But she is so unlikable and so much time at the beginning of the movie is spent on her that the Stone family - and their assorted stories - simply act as an accessory to her story. And, frankly, we just spend the first part of the movie hoping something unlikely will happen like an alien will abduct her or a car will just crash into the house and take her out. No such luck.

The other problem is the Stone family. This is a collection of direct, progressive people who are generally likable. They are immediately accepting of their family members. All of the members of the family sign for Thad, no one has a problem with his homosexuality or his partner's presence in their family. Thus, after such an establishment, it reads as significantly off that only Ben would give Meredith a chance. Meredith enters the house and is immediately stiff. The family, which seems to be caring and flexible, goes out of their way to make her uncomfortable, flaunting her problems as opposed to helping her through them.

So, the viewer stops caring about Meredith, we side with Sybil and her view that Meredith is not right for Everett. Sybil's issues become a side note and used to jerk the audience around. But more than that, the same lack of attention to detail or caring that marks the Stone family's problem above comes into the writing. There is a line of dialogue that Meredith delivers to Everett early on after arriving at the house. She basically says she doesn't want Everett to feel like he jumped into something and committed too soon and then got stuck. Because he hasn't proposed or anything remotely like that, there's a subtext that perhaps she is pregnant. That subtext - and more importantly, the emotional insecurities which created it - are almost instantly disappeared.

And the problem here is not in the acting or even in the characters. This is not a case of quality actors being placed in roles that don't work. This is an instance of quality actors playing interesting, defined enough, characters who simply don't act like how they are defined after a while. So, for example, Amy gives up her room to accommodate Meredith. She is the rebellious youngest member of the family and it seems odd that she is so thrown by being asked to make so small a sacrifice.

Amy is played by Rachel McAdams and her performance is delightful and Diane Keaton gives another performance worthy of her caliber. Luke Wilson, somewhat disappointingly, plays the same essential character we've seen him as before, which he plays well. Wilson is Ben, an educated and extremely casual guy who more or less surfs through the movie simply dealing with what comes up. In a similar way, Dermot Mulroney fails to wow us as Everett. The actor who surprised me most in The Family Stone was Craig T. Nelson. Nelson plays Kelley and it's a mature, quiet role that requires strength, subtlety and intelligence and Nelson nails the role. He might not have a lot of lines in the movie, but he owns the ones he has and in the final scenes of the film he connotes a great deal with his eyes and expressions.

But it is Sarah Jessica Parker who dominates much of the beginning of the movie as Meredith and her performance creates a character that is so unrelentingly unlikable as to be difficult to watch. Parker walks around the screen and one can see she is visibly clenched, creating a tone that is unsettling, uncomfortable and unenjoyable.

Those are three words that are the death knell to any romantic, family comedy or most dramadies. A hard drama, like Magnolia manages to be unsettling and at times uncomfortable, without being unenjoyable. The Family Stone fails on that front. Ultimately, as I said before, by the time The Family Stone becomes noteworthy, the viewer already has stopped caring about the family and their predicaments and foibles.

For other works with Elizabeth Reaser, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Breaking Dawn, Part I
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
New Moon
Twilight
Twilight trading cards P-8 Elizabeth Reaser costume card

4.5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of all my movie reviews!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Nothing Extraordinary About The Rain: The Rainmaker Is Utterly Unmemorable!

The Good: Good acting, Good characters, Good pacing
The Bad: Idealistic themes and plot
The Basics: Simple and predictable, The Rainmaker doesn't fail to please, but it does little beyond meeting our expectations.


There are some novelists who write one or two good novels, then spend the rest of their careers churning out the same two stories over and over again. Their works populate every bus station, airport and drug store. John Grisham, Tom Clancy and V.C. Andrews are three such authors who have written enough garbage such that their paperbacks will always be available in any grocery store that has books.

So, as you may figure, I went into John Grisham's The Rainmaker with pretty low expectations. It turns out that The Rainmaker is one of Grisham's two works that were pretty good, one of the two that established him, it appears, as a paperback staple.

The superlative aspect of this film is the acting. Four actors especially give extraordinary performances. They are: Matt Damon (rather predictably as his character Rudy Baylor, is the lawyer protagonist), Danny DeVito (the loser lawyer Deck Schifflet), Claire Dane (as an abused wife) and Danny Glover (as the strangely uncredited Judge Tyrone Kipler). The real standout of the four is Claire Danes. Danes plays Kelly Riker with amazing versatility. She is vivid as a broken, lost, hurt and depreciated human being. Her acting took me by surprise. She's truly quite fabulous as Kelly.

The Rainmaker focuses on Rudy Baylor, a newly bar-approved lawyer. He is taking on an insurance company for denying the claim (and payment) of a youth with leukemia. With the aid of the sloppy Deck, Rudy makes and tries a case against a corporate law team that seems to have all of the advantages. Interspersed with his big trial, Rudy comes to the aid of Kelly, a victim of domestic abuse by her alcoholic husband. Rudy's special interest in the young woman comes from the fact that he grew up watching his father beat his mother.

That's the type of character fact that is slipped into The Rainmaker throughout. Usually, the details involve Rudy. Occasionally, we get a fact about Deck or Judge Kipler that flesh them out as viable individuals. Character is something sufficiently built up in The Rainmaker and that's refreshing.

What isn't is the plot. It plods along without any real intensity or passion. It's slow and it feels slow. The idealism gets tired early on. The sense of hope throughout the film is labored.

In all, I'd recommend the film for a rainy afternoon where you're bored and want a film you don't have to think much about. Outside that . . .

For other films involving lawyers, please check out my takes on:
The Verdict
The Social Network
Philadelphia

5.5/10

For other film reviews, please check out my lists of movie reviews by clicking here!

© 2011, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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One Last Trip Back In The Time Line: Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines

The Good: Interesting character work, Ending, Special effects
The Bad: Tone and plot
The Basics: When a new set of Terminators are sent back to kill John Connor and his lieutenants, the audience wonders why they bothered, until the end.


The end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (reviewed here!) would have seemed to be a decent ending to the series, but Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines happened anyway. Even so, the third sequel manages to do quite a bit right, making it a pleasant - and hopefully, final - addition to the series. If this was the conclusion to the franchise, the series should be proud of what it accomplishes.

While John Connor does his best to stay off the radar of official organizations and governments, he encounters a young woman from his past. No sooner does he reconnect with Kate Brewster, than a Terminator arrives from the future. The new terminator is a combination of the first and second terminators; a polymorphic robot over an impressive endoskeleton. As John Connor flees, he is aided by a Terminator that was sent back to save him. In the fights and chases that ensue, the Terminator reveals that Judgment Day was merely postponed and the new terminator is virtually indestructible. John and Kate realize that Kate's father is the key to saving the world and head to his Air Force base in an attempt to stop him from putting SkyNet in operation and causing the nuclear holocaust.

Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines has only one serious flaw and that is that we've seen it before. The movie begins exactly as the previous two did and the whole sense at the opening of this installment is "been there, done that." It is hard to care right away about why things are happening, unless one is already a a fan of the franchise. Then it is all right, but hardly as engaging or suspenseful as the previous two.

Fortunately, it does not begin by trying to take itself as seriously as the other two. Instead, director Jonathan Mostow allows some humor as the Terminator acquires his clothes and a fairly casual look at the T-X, the new Terminator. The use of humor is all that makes the beginning bearable. Once John and Kate meet up and begin to run, there is little information given that is important or new.

The problem is that Terminator 3 spends too much time on fight sequences and a ridiculously long chase sequence. It's difficult to watch because it seems like every chase and fight sequence is trying to be bigger than the previous chase or fight sequence I saw before. So, as I watched the crane chase in this movie, I thought back to the last chase I saw (in Matrix Reloaded) and I thought, "Yeah, this was bigger than the last one I saw." The problem was, I didn't care. Yeah, it was bigger and faster, but I've seen a chase scene before. We all have. And in Terminator 3, the chase scene is nothing new, it's just bigger than before. It does not resonate with more emotion, it is not more thrilling, it's just more and faster. Anyone can do that. In fact, that's all directors are doing. They look at the last chase they saw and make one even longer, with more peripheral damage.

Similarly, the fight sequences are outright ruined by the previews to the movie. The best fight moves between the T-X and the Terminator are shown in the theatrical trailer, making it somewhat unimpressive and anticlimactic to see it in context.

What the movie does well is work with a new cast. Claire Danes is wonderful as Kate Brewster. She immediately enters the franchise as a young woman with a great deal of charisma and skill. Danes makes Brewster more than a victim of circumstance and that is refreshing to see. Instead, the Danes lends dignity and realism to a character who is being pushed around quite a bit.

Kristianna Loken, the T-X, makes an auspicious entrance as well. The initial problem I had with Loken is that she lacks screen presence. When I think "Terminator," I think brutal killing machine. Rightly or not, when the new Terminator was announced and viewers were told it would be a woman, I anticipated someone with some gravitas, like Lucy Lawless or even a female wrestler. I was thinking of someone who looked vicious, someone who looked menacing. Loken, however, takes the T-X in a different direction, making her seem like she could be any woman and thus non-threatening and dangerous in a more cunning than blatant way.

Nick Stahl does a good job inheriting a role that has already been established and making it feel like he has been in it all along. Stahl makes John Connor seem reasonably conflicted and a strange combination of reluctant and destined. He plays Connor more casually than intense and it makes the movie worth seeing.

In the end, the best part of the movie is the last half hour. Not because we are happy to see the movie end, but because the climactic scenes are just that, climactic. The end is an intriguing twist that brings a great deal of closure to the franchise and makes the battle we have been watching for hours seem worthwhile. And it's not the typical action-adventure ending, which I liked a great deal.

Is Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines the best of the trilogy? No. But it becomes essential to the story and it is certainly the best way to put the series to rest. It's too bad they had to add so many chases and fights to get us there. This one gets high scores when it sticks to the storytelling, but somewhat lower when it tries to be an action-adventure movie. In the end, it is probably best appreciated by fans of the series.

For other science fiction films, please check out my reviews of:
The Terminator
The Alien Quadrilogy
Star Trek

6.5/10

For other movie reviews, please click here for the appropriate index page!

© 2011, 2007, 2003 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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