Oprah Movie Club Pick for the First Half of February: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

1991 action sequel

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A future which actually ceases to exist after what happens in this movie sends a liquid metal man to the 1990s to kill off a kid with River Phoenix's hair. At the same time, the kid (as an adult) sends the same model of the titular killing machine to help protect himself.

Maybe I'm completely missing something, but this doesn't make any sense, does it? What would Doc Brown say about all of this? Once Sarah starts shooting the black guy and threatening his family, wouldn't all the characters' hands start disappearing in pictures? Is there something that I'm missing from this movie or the original or the sequels I haven't seen that explains the logic behind all this time travel stuff. If the nuclear holocaust is stopped and that playground isn't destroyed and Skynet (my former Internet provider) never existed, then the first Terminator from the previous movie would never have needed to be sent back to kill off John's mother because there wouldn't be robots that want John dead. And John's father wouldn't have come back to protect Sarah, knocking her up in the process. And therefore, John's hand would have started disappearing and Doc Brown would have been going apeshit. Am I wrong here? Did James Cameron, perhaps blinded by his own special effects, not think this all the way through?

I'm just going to say it--I don't think this movie is as good as the first Terminator movie. It reaches too far with a twitching robot arm that ultimately malfunctions.

There's a lot that I did like though. And the number one thing I liked was the performance of Danny Cooksey who was Sam on Different Strokes, the kid with goofy red hair. Here, he's got a goofy red mullet. Cooksey plays John's best friend--Mullet Boy--and almost all the best scenes of Terminator 2 feature his character. Unfortunately, he's not in the movie all that much. He shines with lines like "Your foster parents are kind of dicks" and "I'm gonna get some quarters; I'll be right back, alright?" and gives the douche-iest high five I think I've ever seen in a movie. There's also a great "Wah!" that should be used in a bunch of future action films and called the Cooksey Wah, and a shot of him lifting a tiny boombox over his head with one hand--proudly, the only way one can hoist a boombox--is iconic. I'd love to see a spin-off film with Cooksey's character, maybe where cyborgs are sent from the future to try to give him a haircut or something. And if you tell me his character comes back for the next movies in this franchise, I'm totally in!

A side note: I just love the fact that these kids steal 300 dollars so that they can play Missile Command. In 1997 or whenever this is supposed to take place!

As with the first Terminator movie, Cameron shows off a knack for making characters who don't matter at all stand out in the brief amount of time they're on screen. Here, you get Bol a Gol Gardening guy with a "Praise the Lord" bumper sticker on the back of his stupid-looking truck. That guy's "Hello?" is better than any special effect, stunt, or action sequence in this entire movie. I can't be 100% sure, but I think it's a guy named J. Rob Jordan who was in an episode of Matlock and not much else. There's also a guy who gets hit in the kidney with a smoke grenade and actually says, "God, it hurts!" and a toolish jock who, no matter what he does with his life (he's a stuntman actually) should be known as the "Fuck you, you dipshit!" guy. Oh, and I liked the guard at the sanitarium who licks Sarah's face for unexplained reasons. That guy needs his own prequel, too, while they're making these movies. Fox really messed up with the Sarah Connors television series. They could have had a whole Guy-Who-Licks-Mental-Patients series, and people would have been all over it.

The bad guy--Terminator X or whatever--is cool, but he gets a little redundant after a while. I did like watching himself ooze back together after he was hasta-la-vista-babied away. That was a neat special effect and probably a science experiment at the same time. Robert Patrick's a pretty believable robot and cold-blooded killer type, but the dude's mostly expensive special effects and kind of boring in his invincibility. And once you see a giant pit of lava, you know exactly how he's finally going to die. I'll admit though--I really expected a surprise ending where Danny Cooksey sweeps in and urinates on the T-1000 and says, "Taste that, bitch! Nobody tries to kill my friend!" or something before all the characters head back to the arcade for some Gauntlet. If wishes were horses, Terminators would ride.

I don't even know if I like the other characters. I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was terrific in the first movie, but as he's developed into a cyborg with more and more human feelings, I really started rolling my eyes. Arnold's best in this when he's not speaking at all or speaking in very short sentences. I like the early scene in the biker bar right up until "Bad to the Bone" ruins it because he doesn't say anything that isn't necessary, like a robot on a mission probably would. By the end of the movie, you just wish he'd shut up, especially after the "I need a vacation" line which seems like it belongs in another movie. Maybe Jingle All the Way could have used a line like that. But you do get to see his naked haunches right after a B-movie special effect. He certainly looks cool though, wearing shades for no reason and driving that Harley around. Well, cool until the gimme-five-up-high-down-low-too-slow gag which I can't believe survived any cut of this movie. That shouldn't have even made the special 20th Anniversary Mentally-Ill Second Cousin of the Director Cut.

Speaking of Arnold's high-five partner, Edward Furlong is awful in this. And he's got asshole hair. Listen to when he says, "Miles Dyson! She's gonna blow him away!" and tell me this kid could act. Unfortunately, he's in this movie as much as Arnold, Sarah Connor, or the T-1000, and way more than Danny Cooksey. I was rooting against the kid from the get-go, and that's even with knowing that my future and the future of all humanity depended on his survival. And I'm amazed to find out that Linda Hamilton won Best Female Performance and Most Desirable Female at the MTV Movie Awards for this role. I mean, you'd expect the MTV Movie Awards people to have more sense than that. She's awfully butch here, especially when she goes to Dyson's house. She unleashes her inner-Sigourney, and it never quite works for me.

I feel that I have to give credit to everybody for the physical stuff they had to go through for the parts. I read a little about Arnold Schwarzenegger injuring himself and Hamilton training intensely for the roles. And Danny Cooksey had to grow out his hair a little bit. Oh, and if you look closely, you can see a bit of Robert Patrick's penis. I had to rewind it twelve times and pause for an amount of time that was more than likely not acceptable, but I did catch it. That's two Terminator movies, and two penises. The stunts in this movie are really good for the most part. So are the special effects except for a shot of Arnold rolling after falling off a truck. That looked really dumb, and the movie was lucky that the liquid metal melting together scene was soon after that to make us all forget about it. There's another scene with an obvious dummy being dragged behind a car. The make-up and prosthetics attached to the actors were realistic though, and I really liked a part where Arnold takes the skin off his forearm and hand even though I can't figure out why that actually needed to happen. There are plenty of intense action sequences including one that takes place in an elevator that I wished was a little longer and a few truck/motorcycle or truck/truck or truck/helicopter chases that are typical but nevertheless skillfully shot and impressive. I also liked the slow-motion swinging morphing into some terrifying and chilling imagery with burning playground equipment that reminded me of when I got suspended from elementary school. A dream sequence with some nuclear bomb stuff was equally frightening and realistic enough that I mistook it for stock footage only to find out later that it wasn't. Looked real enough to me though.

I can't figure out exactly why people seemed shocked to find out that I'd never seen this movie. If you want to turn your brain off and enjoy it as a pure popcorn flick, it's great for that. But it's not as good as the first, simpler movie, and I guess I expected something this highly regarded to be a little more intelligent. It baffles me with questions about how the movie can even exist since they've rewritten the future which essentially would erase the past. It gives me a headache just thinking about it, so if you can straighten it all out for me, I'd appreciate it.