Arnie goes back to basics
TERMINATOR:
DARK FATE (15)
HE wasn’t kidding when he said he’d be back.
It’s 35 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered one of cinema’s most quoted one-liners in James Cameron’s The Terminator.
In Dark Fate, the surprisingly entertaining sixth film in the indestructible franchise, his timetravelling cyborg hitman returns with a few grey hairs and a new line in deadpan comedy.
Apparently, he’s spent the past three decades in a shack in Texas, where he has raised an adopted son and started his own curtain selling business.
Hearing him earnestly boast about his eye for “block colours” is a welcome change from the po-faced Genisys movie.
In Dark Fate, producer Cameron ditches the increasingly convoluted mythology of the series and goes back to basics. As in last year’s Halloween reboot, this film acts like the previous instalment never happened. And this time, they have a neat excuse.
The time travelling set-up allows Cameron to dismiss all the films since 1991’s Judgment Day as operating on an erased timeline.
Once again, a cyborg hitman and a human bodyguard arrive from the future to respectively hunt and protect an innocent young woman who may have an important role to play in an upcoming war between robots and mankind.
This time it’s poor Mexican car factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) who receives the unwanted visitors.
Gabriel Luna has the notquite-scary enough role of a new T2-esque Terminator, while Mackenzie Davis plays Grace, the female equivalent of Kyle Reese from the first film. It takes a while for Arnie to make his entrance. First we get to enjoy Linda Hamilton’s comeback as a grizzled Sarah Connor.
She ends up being upstaged by Davis’s muscular newcomer, but she still makes a compelling action heroine.
It may sound like damning with faint praise, but the witty script makes this the most entertaining Terminator film since the second one.