Terminator 3

He’s back – and despite justifiable fears about young Arnold Schwarzenegger’s increasing physical decrepitude, the merciless leather-clad killing machine still kicks ass, and still cuts it as an infinitely more credible action hero than Keanu Reeves in Matrix Reloaded, with which T3 compares pretty favourably on all counts. No expense is spared – conservative estimates put the budget at $160 million – and though James Cameron and Linda Hamilton are nowhere to be seen, there’s a sense of the film being more than a mere cynical money-spinner, with evidently considerable attention lavished on the fight sequences and the special effects.

While it hardly represents the greatest advance for women in world history, a majority of the ass-kicking duties are assumed, very impressively, by an intimidating six-foot blonde supermodel named Kristanna Loken, a female Terminator whom you wouldn’t want to meet down the darkest of alleys. The plot sees mankind’s saviour John Connor (Bully’s Nick Stahl assumes the Ed Furlong role) reach his 18th birthday as the world is on the verge of being taken over, at which point the forces of darkness deploy Loken’s Terminatrix to exterminate him.

The big imponderable on which T3’s success hangs, of course, is Arnie himself: most 56-year-old action men are generally well advised to hang up their guns, but it has to be said that the man remains a freakish force of nature. Dialogue, inflection, depth and nuance remain utterly out of bounds of Schwarzenegger’s limited range, but as a pure embodiment of physical invincibility, Arnie has genuinely yet to be surpassed before or since.

As third instalments go, Terminator 3 is respectable enough: nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but hardly Highlander III or Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles either. By the time they trot out episode four, of course, Herr Schwarzenegger will very likely be Governor of California and well on the way to the White House, at which point we can probably start to build nuclear shelters. For now, though, we might as well enjoy him.