T3 and LB2.
The original Terminator was hardcore action fantasy par excellence, part stalker flick, part sci-fi adventure?unabashedly a boy movie, but hard and lean and unpretentious, with a love story at the center of the action. The first Legally Blonde was the apex of the chick flick, in the same popular weight class as Clueless but not as inventive. By putting both movies in release at once, Hollywood has created a sex split at the multiplex. Ironically, a much-promo'ed fight scene from T3 reduces the box office duel to a single image: old cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger and his newest nemesis, the small, blonde bombshell T-X (Kristanna Loken) bashing each other's faces into walls. (If only the two studios had pooled their resources to make Legally Blonde Terminator 3.)
I wasn't expecting much from Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde, and I wasn't disappointed. Except for a few okay visual gags?like the heroine, clad in a pink skirt suit with pillbox hat climbing the steps of the Capitol surrounded by a sea of drones in black?the humor's almost all verbal, and it's pretty lame. Witherspoon's Elle Woods is a peppy, uncomplicated version of the character she played in Election: the stop-at-nothing Good Girl. Like the first Blonde, this one's the kind of movie daughters (or sons) can go see with their mothers. It pokes fun at cliches of young, modern, upper-middle-class womanhood in a very clever way; like Blonde 1, it embraces, exaggerates and peddles cliches of young women as bonding, empowering, shopping machines who, deep down, still believe in True Love and Girl Power.
Elle tracks down the birth mother of her beloved dog, Bruiser (yes, really), finds the pooch imprisoned in a cosmetic testing lab, urges the bosses of her Boston law firm to drop that company as a client and is fired for her principles. Undaunted, she goes to Washington, where she hopes to pass legislation making cosmetics testing on animals illegal. PETA will probably adore this picture even though the no-makeup-on-bunnies agenda is ideologically cautious; if Elle came out against corporate pig and chicken farms, the nation's meat-eating majority might get annoyed.
But message making isn't the point; machine-tooled, good-enough-for-government-work comedy is. Like the Terminator pictures, the Blonde films don't have much nuance or integrity to lose. The film smartly casts Sally Field as the senator Elle works for, gives them no good scenes together, then arbitrarily transforms Field into a nemesis. As one of Elle's coworkers, outstanding young actress Regina King is reduced to insulting Elle in the first half and adoring her in the second; amiable, blank Luke Wilson, Hollywood's favorite boyfriend, has been promoted to fiance, and spends much of the picture on the phone with Elle, wishing her luck.
The Blonde movies are very crafty: They manage to make fun of Elle while commanding us to root for her, and Witherspoon is so ruthlessly charming?half Diane Keaton, half Doris Day?that it's hard not to comply. It's a star vehicle?the kind of movie where the same heroine can say, "If there's one thing I know how to do, it's rinse and repeat," and "An honest voice can be louder than a crowd," and you're supposed to find both lines endearing. The supporting characters keep reminding Elle of how special she is, and in the last 10 minutes, she is rewarded with two rounds of onscreen applause. In contrast to Clueless, whose Material Girl heroine changed to accommodate the world, the Blonde films force the world to accommodate Elle.
In terms of craft, I give T3 a slight edge. Yet again, the plot finds the T-800 (Arnold, looking so fit that I suspect a digital airbrush job) being sent back in time to stop a rival from killing future resistance leader John Connor (now played by Nick Stahl) and his future wife and lieutenant, Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), who happens to be the daughter of a general who's in charge of America's military computer network. Director Jonathan Mostow fills in for creator James Cameron. As in his previous pictures, Breakdown and U-571, he has a clean, sharp, unsentimental B-picture mentality; his compositions and cuts are lighter, more playful and more precise than Cameron's. He also throws in little jokes that suggest T3 is consciously needling the same super-manly genre it's a part of.
Loken, for instance, looks like a killer supermodel, or one of those video-game heroines that make 13-year-old boys clench their joysticks. The movie teases this feminine ideal during the T-X's arrival, which sees a department store window full of well-dressed female mannequins being incinerated by a time bubble, revealing the villain nude, in an elegant crouch, like a female bodybuilder. Minutes later, when the T-X is pulled over by a burly male cop, she steals a glance at a billboard featuring a sultry, busty female, then tenses up and inflates her own breasts by several cup sizes. (The sound effect suggests Roger Rabbit blowing up a party balloon.)
The T-800 makes a similarly birthday-suited arrival, then strides into a female strip club naked, where he's mistaken for that evening's attraction. Where the Terminator intimidates an obviously gay male stripper into handing over his leather duds, I tensed up a little, expecting the sort of homophobic bully humor that has contaminated so many recent action movies. But the payoff is charming: The cyborg pauses outside the club and, as the Village People's "Macho Man" blares behind him, dons the stripper's sunglasses, which look like something Elton John might have worn in 1975.
The script is variously credited to John Brancato, Michael Ferris and Tedi Sarafian. Structurally, it's almost identical to T2, but Mostow and the writers spin a line from T2?"There is no fate but what we make for ourselves"?in directions that may bug fans. Rather than face up to the fact that all three movies are basically the same movie?and that the reasonably strong, honest lead performances by Stahl and Danes are therefore occurring in a vacuum?T3 contradicts its own philosophy. It suggests that the heroes of the first couple of Terminators weren't really acting out free will, but taking a zigzag route toward an outcome (apocalypse, followed by rebirth) that was preordained and thus inescapable. I'll say no more, except that T3 may be a dumb movie, but it's a smart dumb movie. With its mostly real physical stunts and vehicle smashups, it feels weirdly old-fashioned, almost analog?which is strange considering that the second Terminator marked an evolutionary moment in computer animation. There's something sadly funny in the idea of this series being rendered irrelevant by all the other movies that borrowed its techniques, but as the T-800 himself declares, "I am an obsolete design."