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As John Connor, Christian Bale leads the resistance in "Terminator Salvation."/Warner Bros.
Terminator Salvation
Running time: 115 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13 (extreme violence, profanity)
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Clang, clang, clang went the trolley and, as it turns out, "Terminator Salvation."
Now I know what Christian Bale was screaming about in that much-leaked outburst of anger on the set of the third "Terminator" sequel.
At first I thought it must be the script, or lack of same. Taking a deeper look, though, the culprit for a lackluster fourth installment in the once-magnificent sci-fi franchise is director McG.
McG? That's right. No first name and just a hint of a surname. Just McG.
The former music video director (OK, real name Joseph McGinty Nichol), a former TV commercial and music video director, came out of nowhere -- and before that Kalamazoo -- to direct "Charlie's Angels" in 2000.
After sitting through almost two hours of clanking robots scavenging Earth for post-apocalypse remaining humans and the John Connor-led resistance fighting back the best they can, here's the bottom line.
The "Terminator" franchise runs out of gas before it empties its arsenal of fire power.
James Cameron, long before he went all "Titanic," king-of-the-world happy, wrote and directed the original "Terminator" in 1984. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a brilliant, effective case of typecasting, portrayed a robot; a machine hellbent only on destruction.
The first "Terminator" was an action sci-fi thriller that lived up to all its descriptive words.
Cameron also cranked out the sequel, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," in 1991. The trilogy concluded with its own big bang theory in 2003. Cameron was long gone, so Jonathan Mostow ignited the nuke shower known as Judgment Day in "T3" (2003).
After a quick set-up circa 2003 where a convicted murderer (Australian Sam Worthington) sells his body to "science" for a kiss just moments before his execution, suddenly it's 2018.
It says so across McG's grainy, bleached out screen. Off we go as John Connor (Bale as the adult freedom fighter) resists the attack mode of his own resistance leaders. He goes up against a half-man, half-machine and every T-800 (including Schwarzenegger in an all-too-brief, computer-generated vintage cameo) in not-so-sunny California to save the human race and his future father Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin of "Star Trek"), who's a boy in 2018.
Don't ask me to explain the convoluted time line. I'm still trying to figure out the wacky screen calendar of "Star Trek."
The script isn't the problem here. John Brancato and Michael Ferris, the veteran screening team who wrote "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," insert enough human nature to provide a little character depth.
Worthington, who'll soon appear in Cameron's 3-D sci-fi actioner "Avatar," pulls off the confusion of a person (or thing) baffled about who or what he really is with gruff emotion.
And Moon Bloodgood ("What Just Happened") makes every second count as Blair Williams, the tough resistance pilot who can't resist Marcus Wright's (Worthington) strange desperate appeal.
Unfortunately, McG, who also guided Matthew McConaughey through "We Are Marshall" (2006), appears to be making the "Transformers" sequel more than a "Terminator" actioner at times. This thing's top heavy on inanimate objects, even for a movie where machines rule.
At one point, McG even sends Bale speeding off on a two-wheeled motorcycle thing called a Moto-Terminator. In last year's "The Dark Knight," Bale's Batman popped a wheelie or two on something very similar; the Batcycle.
Despite the mechanical nature of "Terminator Salvation," it does have a heart, and it beats strongly in one of the key characters.
What the first entry in what might become the second "Terminator" trilogy lacks is soul.
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