Bruno

It's Hard Being Not Gay
Sacha Baron Cohen Makes Funny, But Can't Get His Story Straight
By Cole Smithey

Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up to the hilarious  Borat" provokes half as many laughs in a seemingly less improvised comedy that goes twice again as far as Borat in goosing sexual sight gags designed to make even the most numb audience members blanch. Cohen's comic incarnation of Bruno is a flamboyantly gay host of an Austrian television fashion show called "Funkyzeit" from which the self-professed supermodel is fired for his shenanigans at a Milan runway show where his self-made Velcro jumpsuit causes untold destruction. Determined to become "the most famous Austrian superstar since Hitler," Bruno travels to Hollywood to start his own celebrity talk show. An awkward interview with Paula Abdul in an empty house where Mexican immigrant workers sit in as literal furniture leads Bruno to realize that in order to be famous, he must convert to heterosexuality. Along the way, Bruno attempts to seduce politician Ron Paul, seeks advice from an effeminate Christian expert at converting gays into straights, goes on a hunting trip with some Arkansas good ole boys, and auditions irresponsible parents for their babies to act in a movie with his own "adopted" black baby. Some set-ups work better than others, but the film's main failing lies in the contrived character of Bruno, whose Jew-in-a-gay-goy-body tries too hard to provoke the humorous rejection that the character so avidly demands. That said, Sacha Baron Coen picks up where Tom Green left off as cinema's most cunning agent provocateur.  

It took four writers (Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer, and Jeff Schaffer) to generate the piecemeal skits that loosely connect Bruno's transition from European television commodity to Hollywood interloper. It's a jagged collection of jaw-dropping bits of humor shoved together where a linear story might go. Although the production values are generally higher here, "Bruno" represents a missed opportunity for Cohen to fine tune an already problematic story form built on "Candid Camera" styled stunts and awkward interview situations. The bane of modern filmmaking, voice-over narration, is sprinkled around like so much hamburger helper as a way of bringing the audience in on the jokes, but merely serves as a constant reminder of how sloppy the storytelling is.

Director Larry Charles ("Borat") throws down the gross-out gauntlet early on with Bruno and his miniature boytoy Diesel (Clifford Bañagal) engaging in accessory-accompanied sodomy with things like champagne bottles, for which only the actors' naughty bits are blacked out. But nothing prepares you for the sample episode of Bruno's Hollywood celebrity talk show for a focus group of L.A. locals. When Bruno's full-screen acrobatic penis begins a dance of lifts and circles before briefly speaking to the camera like a small mouth bass with a ventriloquist, some parents may wish they hadn't brought their pre-teen, or even teenaged, children along. The bawdy humor kicks up a few more notches during Bruno's uncomfortably clothed presence at an actual swingers' party of straights that dips the movie into porno territory even with its strategically placed blacked-out blotches.   
    
The satire is aimed metaphorically at a large slice of America that will do anything for a crack at fame, even if it means a mother giving liposuction to her 30-pound baby to get her kid in a video playing a "Nazi" pushing a "Jewish" baby into a fake oven. That this perceived group might also take more than its share of pride at being "straight" is skewered on a trailer park Bar-B-Q skewer during a caged wrestling match where all it takes is the sight of two men kissing to bring the crowd to a real chair-throwing frenzy. Sacha Baron Cohen's endlessly milked joke is that hypocrisy is funny. To that end he has plenty of ammunition to create plenty more arcane characters assigned to the dirty work of punking every city on the planet. He just needs to improve his storytelling abilities.   
(Universal Pictures) Rated R. 82 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

My Sister's Keeper

Three-Hankie Weepie
Nick Cassavetes Turns on the Waterworks
By Cole Smithey

Nick Cassavetes' three-hankie weepy lurches during moments of music-video sequences, and gratuitous voice-over narration from members of the Fitzgerald family as they struggle with their terminally ill daughter Kate (well played by Sofia Vassilieva). Parents Sara (Cameron Diaz in the best performance of her career to date) and Brian (played by the ever-dependable Jason Patric) made an ethically challenging decision when they chose to conceive a second daughter, Anna (Abigail Breslin), as a genetically engineered resource to physically help keep leukemia-stricken Kate alive. At eleven, Anna decides that she wants to be legally exonerated from her bodily responsibilities to Kate, and seeks medical emancipation with the aid of Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), a successful ambulance-chasing attorney. A court battle, overseen by an especially perceptive Judge De Salvo (Joan Cusack), looms while Kate pursues romance with a cancer-suffering patient named Taylor (Thomas Dekker). The crux of the drama comes down to Sara's ability as a mother to see beyond her involuntary urge to fight like a martyr for the life of a daughter whose pain and suffering must eventually come to an end. In spite of some of its less than elegant editorial decisions, "My Sister's Keeper" is full of terrific performances all around. Joan Cusack is phenomenal as a judge recovering from the loss of her own daughter, and Abigail Breslin confirms her status as one of the most gifted young actors in the business.  

Co-written by Jeremy Leven and Cassavetes, the film is based on the Jodi Picoult's 2004 novel, and blunders whenever the filmmaker puts himself between the material and his actors. The movie opens with Anna's narration, showing off her mature-for-her-age comprehension of how "most babies are accidents" because "only people who have trouble making babies actually plan for them." The language is a little to cutesy for the material--it feels like it came from a romantic comedy--and tilts the drama too far toward Anna as a would-be protagonist, while that barley obscured obligation falls much more squarely on the shoulders of Kate, who finds a number of unusual ways to mediate the family crisis that is her life and consequently trickier aspects of the narrative.

Anna is expected to soon donate one of her kidney's to Kate when she enters Campbell Alexander's office to request his legal defense in getting her off the hook for the surgery. After years of donating blood and bone marrow, with the effect of limiting the activities that she can or will ever be able to participate in, Anna's medical predicament is an especially sensitive one to Campbell, whose own physical defects cause him no end of public humiliations, as we discover later on.

Anna's legal action causes a blow out rift with her mother, who runs both-guns-blazing into Campbell's office to confront the clear-eyed attorney in a well crafted dramatic scene that sets the stage for the courtroom sub-plot that distracts from Kate's daily struggles with chemotherapy as a toxic balm to her cancer ravaged body. 

"My Sister's Keeper" manages to encompass the complexities of a disjointed family acting with best intentions in a medical calamity that necessarily involves a battery of outside influences. If only Cassavetes could have trusted the film enough to leave out the distancing montage music sequences and beside-the-point narration, he could have approached a perfect drama. Nonetheless, with the aid of a great cast,  Cassavetes has made a movie that will relieve six months worth of tears for audiences willing to take its cathartic journey.  

(New Line/Warner Bros) PG-13. 106 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

$9.99

Baked Hope
Clay Animation Hits a Narrative Wall
By Cole Smithey

An urban Sidney, Australian apartment building is the alternately public and private forum for a disparate collection of humanity represented as animated clay people in Tatia Rosenthal's quirky yet unsatisfying stop-motion drama that vacillates between a gee-whiz philosophy, surreal digressions of whimsy, and twisted sexual expression. Geoffrey Rush is the voice of a suicidal homeless man who comes back as a disenfranchised winged angel to converse with an aged tenant after having offed himself in the presence of Jim (voiced by Anthony La Paglia), a widowed father to a couple of grown boys busy searching for the meaning of life in all the wrong places. Surreal elements blend with a prosaic narrative that refuses to ever come to life. The film is significant if only as a first co-production between Tel Aviv and Australian film companies. Intriguing as a flawed experiment in animation, "nine dollars ninety-nine" (as it's spoken in proper Aussie dialect) suffers from a lack of thematic continuity that leaves the audience wanting both more and less--more story and less metaphor.  

The most striking aspect of "9.99" is how simultaneously fantastic yet awful its stop-motion animated elements are. The buildings and set designs are infinitely impressive, while more often than not the clay characters' faces repel when they should invite audience affiliation.

The film's thematically loose title comes from the price that its twentysomething character Dave Peck pays for a mail order book that purports to contain the meaning of life. Yet somehow the filmmakers never allow Dave to speak the magic words that he is convinced have given meaning to his existence. It's a film that sets out to be a "meditation" on the significance of hope, and as such dooms itself to wallow in an over-intellectualized mire of metaphorical experiences. A little boy who dreams of possessing a toy figure of a soccer player with a ball attached to his toe, gets a piggy bank from his father that will enable him to save up every 50 cent reward he gets for finishing his milk to purchase the plaything. But the child misreads the significance of the bank and becomes so beguiled by the inanimate pig's smile that he forgets about toy he once wanted, and seeks deliverance for the hollow pig. It's a subplot that seems to prove the Eastern European ideology that hope is a useless concept.  

Adapted from short stories by Etgar Keret, the film's tag line, that it's an animated feature which "offers slightly less than $10 worth about the meaning of life," is unfortunately all to true about a movie whose visuals far outweigh its dramatic reach. For a movie that could only shoot 20 seconds of footage a day, "9.99" offhandedly gives greater credence to the "Wallace & Gromit" animators, who grasp the narrative demands of their chosen area of stop-motion animation with a fully-realized intentionality.  

Rated R. 78 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

Whatever Works

Beating a Dead Horse
Woody Allen Announces His Demise
By Cole Smithey

Here's evidence that Woody Allen's return to making films in America--it's his first since 2004 ("Melinda and Melinda")--comes with the loss of his mind. Adapted from a script Allen wrote some 30 years ago, "Whatever Works" is a desperate attempt at comedy that only relaxes its death grip whenever Allen's alter ego Boris Yellnikoff (grossly played by Larry David) is absent from the screen. The movie starts off with a fourth-wall-breaking rant by Boris, doing a bad Woody Allen impersonation, about what a joke life is and how its everyone's duty to "filch" whatever amount of joy they can from this cruel world. It's the film's, and ostensibly, Woody Allen's personal mission statement. Then Boris, a suicidal retired college professor, has the good fortune to share his downtown Manhattan apartment with Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a newly arrived runaway (she's 17) from the Deep South whose sublime ignorance provides an empty vessel for Boris to fill with his grumpy ideas and poisonous opinions. At first Boris deflects the randy nymph's advances with a stream of hostility-fueled barbs, but eventually enters into a doomed marriage with the girl who is roughly a fourth of his age. Boris' and Melody's quaint domestic life is upset when her religious-right mother Marietta (well played by Patricia Clarkson) shows up at their door several month's in advance of her ex-husband John's (Ed Begley) arrival in New York. Old men and young girls sharing romance is a card that Woody Allen has overplayed throughout his career, and it's a trope that has run out of steam. Here's a movie that feels thrown together, as if Allen is attempting to purge as many films as he can before he shuffles off his mortal coil. His legacy is going in an emotionally threadbare direction.

In 1979 Woody Allen made Manhattan, a romantic comedy about a middle aged comedy writer dating a 17-year-old high school student (played by the high cheek-boned Noxema girl Mariel Hemingway). Even in the groupie-friendly '70s, the director's love letter to the Big Apple--and possibly the best film of his career--met with harsh criticism for what was and is a condition of statutory rape. Now decades later, Allen pulls out the same narrative meme albeit with a much grumpier and far less horny malcontent who goes unwillingly down the isle with his fated Lolita, who will temporarily assuage Woody's itchy alter-ego before ultimately confirming his worst fears by abandoning him. Woody puts plenty of well-defended barriers between himself and his ever-present detractors. First, his protagonist's name is Boris Yellnikoff--got it. Next, he's mad with a capitol "M." No one can criticize a guy who won't quit shouting because no judge, jury, or magistrate could ever get a word in edgewise. Finally, Boris is a genius of string theory--a scientific philosophy that, not ironically, has never provided any quantitative experimental predictions. So it is that the audience suffers Larry David's painful imitations of Woody Allen as if he were auditioning for an off-Broadway play. At least his character is suicidal. 

The most refreshing thing about Woody Allen's recent European films was their lack of an actor doing their best, or worst, Woody Allen impression. You'd think that after seeing Kenneth Branagh humiliate himself in "Celebrity," Woody Allen would have learned his lesson about creating such self-defeating performances for his leading men.

The ham-handed moral of "Whatever Works" is that whoever comes into contact with Boris--the moaning, desperate mastermind--will become a smarter, more self-fulfilled person by osmosis. Marietta becomes a successful art photographer living in a ménage a trois lifestyle--she's a nymphomaniac--with a couple of ardent college professors, while her ex-husband finds the courage to come out as a gay gun fetishist. I suppose you could give Woody Allen credit for being a dreamer, but his dream reads more as a nightmare than as a place where you'd want to spend even an hour.
Rated PG-13. 92 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

Seraphine

Modern Primitive
Yolande Moreau Unleashes an Artist's Heart
By Cole Smithey

In writer/director Martin Provost's patiently restrained biopic about the self-trained French painter Seraphine Louis, the audience is brought increasingly closer into the heart and mind of a genius whose turbulent inner life eventually envelops her conscious being. Yolande Moreau ("Les plages d' Agnes") gives an earthy and compelling performance, measured by her character's direct connection to the natural world around her. The film's achievement lies in connecting Seraphine's '20s era working class life, from freelance house maid to a successful artist, under the inestimable patronage of Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German art critic and collector who champions Seraphine for her scintillating artistic ability. That the filmmaker does so, while delicately sketching in the underlying influences of World War I and the Great Depression, adds to the film's overall effect as a fully formed narrative of immense social breadth and artistic fulfillment. 

The 48-year-old Seraphine goes about her daily tasks of mopping floors and making wheelbarrow deliveries to clients that try to cheat her, with the singular purpose of collecting the materials she needs to construct colors for her self-made paints later in the evening. The blood of cow's livers will be ground up with mortar and pestle into red paint. In public she carries herself with a selfish innocence that functions as an unpretentious defense mechanism against snarky shop owners and locals that insult her as a pathetic kook. Late at night, Seraphine paints by candlelight in her tiny apartment, where she must constantly rush past the landlord who troubles her for past due rent. Accompanying herself with religious hymns, that she sings in full voice, Seraphine paints with a rapturous sense of the sublime, all the while maintaining a sober awareness of her immediate artistic goals that leave her utterly depleted by morning. There's a confessional quality that the painter confides through her individual art that divulges her inner nature as a sensualist making love to her ideal object of desire. Rich, dark blue backgrounds buoy magnificent, borderline psychedelic, paintings of fictional flowers that reflect a wildly lusty and occasionally humorous manifestation of nature. Yolande Moreau uses her substantial physical bearing to greet her character's al fresco surroundings. When she swims nude in a river, Moreau's ample body consumes the natural world around her like a planet caught in an inevitable orbit. At once dignified and gutsy, the actress represents an artist free of artifice.

One of Seraphine's housekeeping clients is Wilhelm Uhde, a wealthy, gay avant-garde art collector--he discovered Picasso and Le Douanier Rousseau--vacationing from Paris in Senlis with his sister. Even before Uhde haphazardly discovers one of Seraphine's paintings during a comical dinner party with some local art snobs, the he and Seraphine share a kindred appreciation for each other that is liberated by Uhde's realization of his cleaning lady's fountain of talent that he labels as "modern primitive." Unable, or unwilling, to realize the implications of Uhde's diverted romantic perspective, Seraphine allows herself to be passionately motivated by him in her art. However, Uhde's unqualified patronage is cut short when suspicious locals recognize his German heritage and chase him out of town. It isn't until years later, after the end of WW I, that Uhde passes through Senlis again and dares to visit Seraphine's apartment in the distant hope that she might still be alive, and painting. For a brief period, under Uhde's generous financial support, Seraphine is able to live beyond her means. She begins to work on much larger canvases, and displays an abandon with color that transforms her daily efforts into a prolific spree of chiaroscuro inspiration. The lush paintings are transfixing, and the director brings to light the magic of their complexity in narratively creative ways that reward the viewer with a full appreciation for works of art that now hang in world class museums.

It's easy to place "Seraphine" in with films like "Pollack" or "Camille Claudel," and disregard the significance of those films as sophisticated examples of a genre that is all to often underestimated, in spite of its inherent artistic importance in the lexicon of film. Seraphine de Senlis--she renamed herself to reflect her hometown--was an artist of tremendous skill and insight, who might have lived a more fully realized artistic life had not the Great Depression obliterated a fully-realized lifestyle that the artist embraced with a voracious appetite when she had the opportunity. While Seraphine was able to rise above provincial class restrictions to create her art, the global economic collapse of the Great Depression proved too daunting an obstacle for such an artistic soul tethered to the earth by trees, fruits, flowers, and religious inspiration.
(Music Box Films) Not Rated. 128 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

The Hangover

Low Art
Nothing Stays in Vegas
By Cole Smithey

To its credit, "The Hangover" transfers to the audience the smelly, still inebriated state that the title promises. Director Todd Phillips ("Old School") is nothing if not relentless in his pursuit of a full, mixed sack of masculine stupidity at the hand of drink, drugs, and the dubious charms of Las Vegas. In the interest of their soon-to-be-wedded pal Doug (Justin Bartha), best friends Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms), let future brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis) come along for the ride to Vegas where the circumstances of their bachelor party celebrations spiral out of control. A drunken night of childish carousing leaves the group missing their prime member Doug and sends the absentminded trio on a humor-riddled mission to reconstruct the night's events and locate Doug in time to get him to his wedding on time. A kidnapped tiger belonging to Mike Tyson, brushes with the police and criminals alike, and a missing tooth for Phil are just some of the painful humiliations that our motley group endure on their way to a clearer understanding of their  transgressions. Gratuitous sex, pratfalls, and goofy violence come with the territory in this over-the-top guys' comedy. A word to the wise, stay for the closing credit sequence to see a droll photo collage of outtake events from the lost hours of darkness.     

Getting blind drunk in a strange place is a recipe for disaster without the addition of the "roofies" that wannabe metrosexual Alan slips into shots of Jagermeister for he and his buddies--on a Las Vegas hotel rooftop no less. When Zach slices open the palm of his hand in preparation for joining as blood brothers with the other guys, the filmmakers set up the kind of grace under physical pressure that the characters, vis-a-vis, the audience will endure through car crashes, punch-outs, and sexually blank nudity.

If there's a moral to the story, it is that drugs and drink don't mix. It's not a message that audiences will extract as a prickly needle from the haystack of situational (read random) comic set-pieces that the filmmakers play like trump cards from the bottom of a stacked deck, but it does anchor film's narrative boat.

"The Hangover" is a movie based almost entirely on comic surprise. When our hapless overgrown boys wake up in their expensive Vegas hotel-suite-turned-trailer-park, the detailed destruction that inexplicably took place the night before is stupefying. An enormous pyramid of empty beer bottles overseen by a confused rooster is a mere intro to a labyrinth of unexplained circumstance. An abandoned infant and a bathroom-ensconced tiger deliver an immediacy to the plight of three guys that you'd be just as likely to meet at a bar in LA or New York.

Contrasting character archetypes between Stu (a downtrodden, nerdy dentist with a mysteriously missing tooth), Phil (the implacable playboy) and Zach (an unpredictable jester) give the comedy a modern take on a Marx Brothers form where outrageous sequences merely serve to frame the mental gymnastics and tortured physical condition of the comedians. Secondary characters enter at varying degrees of antagonistic composure as the guys retrace their steps from the night before toward finding Doug. Mike Tyson does some memorable screentime, dispensing an off-key singing performance that packs a punch, and Heather Graham takes the prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotype to a whole new level.

But the supporting cast scene-stealing award goes to Ken Jeong as Mr. Chow, a flamboyantly gay gangster with an axe to grind over being nakedly abducted into a car trunk and having $80,000 stolen from him. Mr. Chow's language is hilariously profane, and makes audible the twisted logic of screenwriters in tune with the internet era of diabolically raunchy ideas. Think of it as low art executed as a high ideal. It is funny.

Rated R. 99 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

Up

Sweet Balloons
3D Animation Takes Flight
By Cole Smithey

As a viable response to the brilliant opening sequence in last year's animated "Wall-E," the creators of "Up" concoct a flawless introduction that encapsulates the development and longevity of a happy marriage between Carl Frederickson (deftly voiced by Ed Asner) and his adorable wife Ellie. A black-and-white 30's era newsreel, about Charles Muntz (a Lindbergh-styled aviator adventurer), captures the imagination of little-boy Carl whose perfect mate arrives in the guise Ellie, a snaggle-toothed lass who share's Carl's imagination for adventure. Carl and Ellie eventually get adult jobs together at a local adventure park--he sells balloons. Their shared dream of living in a house high atop "Paradise Falls," a remote spot in South America "lost in time," binds the couple as the years pass too quickly for Ellie's lifespan to see the dream to fruition. The story-within-a-story is as bittersweet as it is affecting for the delicacy of the animator's graphic style and the sophisticated storytelling that gracefully connects the dots of its agreeable subjects. It's a set up that ties the audience to Carl as a lovable character, whose journey we already admire. 

With invasive urban construction dwarfing his once serene, and modest house, the recently widowed Carl sets out to make good on his promise to Ellie, and travel to the place they had always dreamed of going. At 78 Carl uses a walker, a hearing aid, and a set of dentures that will later come in handy as a most unorthodox weapon. An unfortunate mishap with a meddling construction worker ends up with a court order for Carl to be placed in an assisted care facility called Shady Oaks. However, by then Carl has already had the mild discomfort of meeting Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), an enthusiastic if chubby nine-year-old Junior Wilderness Explorer attempting to earn his final badge--for helping an elderly person such as Carl. Russell gets his wish when he's carried off into the air on Carl's front porch as part the house that Carl ingeniously attaches thousands of brightly colored helium balloons.

The style of character animation, under supervising animator Steve May, is built on a contrast between square and round features. In his rectangular black rimmed spectacles, giant round nostril-free nose, square jaw and squat stature, Carl is a white-haired grandfather figure who still wears the tree-house club badge--made from a grape soda bottle cap--that Ellie pinned on him when they first met. Russell carries a full backpack, loaded down with enough stuff to make him weigh roughly the same as Carl. The duo's combined mass works to their advantage when, after surviving a huge storm that shakes up Carl's mobile house pretty well, they arrive in South America and have to tug the cottage like a giant kite to get to Paradise Falls. The actual site that inspired the location is a place in Venezuela called Angel Falls, famous as the highest water falls in the world, where the water is atomized before it can reach the bottom.

Russell's love of chocolate attracts the attention of a rare wild bird that endears herself to the youngster as a lively pet companion. Russell names the female bird Kevin--her babies play a key role in the plot--and the team encounter a friendly dog whose unseen master has equipped him with a collar that enables him to speak English, and a few other languages under the right dial setting. What isn't immediately apparent to Carl and Russell are the legion of attack dogs associated with their newfound canine friend.

Christopher Plummer is perfectly diabolical as the would-be hero who turns out to be quite the opposite when our well-intentioned team meet up with the mystery man of the jungle. The narrative brilliantly comes to be about Carl's ability to redirect his life to the service of the fatherly relationship he develops with Russell. Peter Docter and co-director/screenwriter Bob Peterson have outdone themselves with a balanced and touching story well served by 3-D animation. "Up" is the first animated 3-D film to so fully complete its narrative and visual tasks with such apparent ease and meaningful detail. You can tell that this film was a labor of love, and that the cast and crew were sufficiently inspired by the material to craft a children's movie that is destined to be a classic. Warm and fuzzy? You bet.
Rated PG. 89 mins. A+ (Five Stars)  

Terminator Salvation

Dark Future
Spectacle Trumps Satire
By Cole Smithey

More of a 21st century "Mad Max" than a continuation of the Terminator franchise that seasoned audiences are familiar with, director McG's post apocalyptic man versus industrial-robot-military-complex lurches through fits and starts of spectacle that almost add up to a story. Helena Bonham Carter plays mad scientist Dr. Serena Kogan who uses the body of executed convict Marcus Wright (played by Sam Worthington) for her latest and last--she's dying of cancer--experiment of creating an indestructible human/machine hybrid. Christian Bale plays alpha male Resistance leader John Connor, whose blanket radio transmissions begin with "If you're listening to this, you are the resistance." With his pregnant wife Kate (Bryce Dallas Howard) awaiting his return, Connor sets off on a mission to rescue a group of prisoners from the country-occupying robot clutches of Skynet, whose prisoner Kyle Reese (played by Anton Yelchin) is of special importance. From an action standpoint, "Terminator Salvation" is an eye-blasting fiesta accompanied by good performances from Bale, Worthington, Yelchin, and Moon Bloodgood as a hot shot soldier. However, the film comes up short with an underdeveloped story and some abysmal performances from actors in secondary roles--reference lackluster efforts from Common, as a Resistance soldier, and child actor Jadagrace playing a mute witness.

Bale's John Connor works under the gruff leadership of Michael Ironside's General Ashdown, whose guts-for-glory presence gets hung out to dry thanks to inattention from screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris ("Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"). Known for his performances in Paul Verhoeven's "Robocop" and "Starship Troopers," Ironside effectively chews what little scenery he's given but gets lost in a shuffle of gonzo Transformers-styled spectacle.

Where the movie excels best is in all things big, fast, and metal. In the 2018 prophesized world of perpetual darkness, Skynet's arsenal of bots includes articulated Hydrobot creatures that swim like snakes and have extracting tongue-and-claw mouths--think "Alien," and colossal spider-like Harvester aircraft capable of plucking up humans in their gigantic claws. The Harvesters go all Transformer when they eject high-revving motorcycle bots called Moto-Terminators that enable a thrilling chase sequence when Connor hot wires one.

As a sequel to a sequel of a sequel, "Terminator Salvation" doesn't waste time with how-we-got-here exposition, but as such doesn't connect easily to the rest of the franchise either. The tone here is distinctly more downbeat as reflected in the film's drab color palate and muted lighting. And if you're looking for humor, you've come to the wrong movie. John Conner is the now-grown character that Edward Furlong played in "T2," and whose purpose--to defeat Skynet and save the world--depends on his ability to rescue Kyle Reese as the man who will eventually father him. (Got it?) The future-past-future time device comes off as an obvious ploy designed to milk more sequels. The trouble is that the screenwriters don't build enough character development around the quirky plot anchor. Chemistry between Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard is zilch, with Howard visibly straining to work up some crystal of romantic attraction with a character over-amped about his responsibility to save humanity. Connor listens dutifully to cassette recordings his mother made to guide him on his mission, but he doesn't share as much communication with the woman who will bear his child. As a result, Sam Worthington's cyborg-with-a-beating-heart Marcus presents a more interesting character, and steals the movie as a rival anti-hero. A chance meeting with Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), the last badass woman on the planet, gives the movie a much-needed jolt of sensuality.

"Terminator Salvation" isn't the sci-fi extravaganza I'd hoped for, but it does fulfill on its promise of visually articulating the robot mentality that America's military seems geared to accomplish. Without a someone like a Paul Verhoeven writing and directing it, the Terminator franchise will slug out another sequel every so many years for audiences to get to the bottom of their popcorn. The opportunity for loaded satire of colored thematic fruits from such ripened narrative soil will likely go unseeded. There is, however, a wellspring of potential in the franchise for the right filmmaker to generate a "Starship Troopers" kind of frisky movie that goes beyond the constraints of spectacle-generated entertainment toward sophisticated sci-fi satire. Until that time comes, take what you can get.

Rated PG-13. 116 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)