Red Sonja

Based on a Marvel comics character created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, director Richard Fleischer's Red Sonja is an odd adjunct to Arnold Schwarzenegger's barbarian films in which the Austrian oak does not even play everyone's favourite Cimmerian. Sold in the Italian market as Yado (a choice that, bizarrely, implores immediate comparison with Yoda, the amphibian guru from The Empire Strikes Back), complete with a ghostly poster image of Schwarzenegger swirling in the mists of time, Red Sonja is instead a star vehicle for Brigitte Nielsen, a model-turned-actress who is striking and statuesque but otherwise lacking in any of the kind of experience required to carry such a project. Since this is a production of the Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, Red Sonja is pretty lavishly appointed though. The costume and production design, courtesy of the Academy Award winning Danilo Donati, far outstrips every other aspect of the picture. Outfits are suitably baroque, seemingly drawing inspiration from Windsor-Smith's beautiful detailed pin-ups of these mythological characters. Sets are likewise well appointed, with the cavernous, steaming throne room of Sandahl Bergman's evil queen a particular highlight. Despite all this wonderful dressing Red Sonja is a lifeless trudge that often seems to be poking fun at its own limitations. A prolonged battle between Schwarzenegger's Lord Kalidor and a mechanical fish is so repetitive that it becomes clear that every scrap of coverage containing this nascent (and increasingly bankable) superstar is being used. And, not long after, a slow treacherous creep along what looks like a sheer rock face for the principal adventurers is suddenly revealed to be a few feet from the floor when Paul Smith's bodyguard rushes into the frame to help his bratty princeling hop off the hazard. 

Eraser

For some inexplicable reason, director Chuck Russell's Eraser is unusually interested in presenting Arnold Schwarzenegger in ways that are incongruous to the star's, by now long-established, screen image. Unfortunately this disharmony has nothing to do with the kind of character or emotional wavelength Schwarzenegger is being expected to play. John Kruger is not a stretch for the actor, the character an only lightly evolved version of the cyborg bodyguard seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Rather than stand between James Cameron's futuristic Christ and incoming bullets, this T-800 has been assigned (programmed?) to protect Vanessa Williams' Lee Cullen, a senior executive at a weapons manufacturer who has snooped too deeply into her company's extra-legal affairs and caught the attention of a government hit squad. Russell has woven a different kind of friction into Eraser then, one specifically to do with the outrageous physical feats being mapped onto Arnold's forty nine year old body. 

The film's opening action sequence sees Schwarzenegger entering a blown FBI safehouse to rescue a former charge from an army of prowling mobsters. In the melee, a masked Kruger delivers an unusually high roundhouse kick to the shoulder of a snacking assassin before using a refrigerator door to twist the stunned man's skull away from his neck. Spine snapping may be standard for this era of tape cinema but the spin-kick that stuns the heavy comes off as lightly comical, especially given that this too-athletic turning strike follows a gormless close-up of Schwarzenegger's face bursting out of a black balaclava. Doubling isn't anything new for an action star like Schwarzenegger - True Lies from the previous year is riddled with physically smaller men hurtling around in cranium expanding wigs - but Russell's application is the first time where it begins to feel deliberately farcical, as if the director is sending up the limping machismo of his ageing hero. 

A later sequence in which Kruger pirouettes off a docking crane then drops thirty feet onto a group of gangsters isn't just laughable though, it's risible. The feat completely at odds with a persona built around unusually cunning musculature. With Schwarzenegger seemingly being boxed off to the knacker's yard, it falls to James Caan as treacherous US Marshal Robert DeGuerin to generate the film's stranger, but much more memorable, situations. A hostage rescue sequence in which DeGuerin shows his true colours - while Schwarzenegger is busy using an enormous knife to pin creeping stunt players to hardwood doors - has a surprising level of cruelty to it. After executing a bewildered (and obviously conspiratorial) kidnapper, DeGuerin embraces the heavy's sobbing captive. While soothing the shattered woman with baby talk, his hand inches towards the pistol held by the man DeGuerin has just shot. The Marshal seizes the death-gripped side arm then thrusts it up into the lady's chest, blasting a hole through her. 

While the hostage chokes and drowns on her own blood, DeGuerin begins miming his way through a CPR routine; pinching the dying woman's nose, to obstruct her dying gasps, while blowing uselessly on her cheek. His eyes dart to the nearest doorframe, willing it to be filled by some clueless rookie who can then go on to corroborate his version of events. The impressive thing about this sequence, in an otherwise rote action extravaganza, is that Caan is unafraid to be seen as truly vile in these moments. His demeanour is scurrying and venal as he powers through a charade that is both opportunistic and breathtakingly callous. The gurgling hostage is treated as a prop in DeGuerin's collapsing fiction. She is physically manipulated, in her death throes, by a man who has killed her for his own immediate (but hardly far-reaching) benefit. Caan doesn't shy away from the rape subtext in this scene either - the actor doesn't attempt to play this sequence in ways that are clinical or expert, he slobbers all over his victim, twisting and turning her in ways so obviously objectionable that the British film censor hacked the sequence to pieces for the film's UK release. 

Terminator: Dark Fate - METAL MOTHER FUCKER

There's a shot in this featurette for Terminator: Dark Fate that appears to be Gabriel Luna's carbon fibre cyborg dressed as an ICE officer, pirouetting through his fellow, border patrolling goons. Behind them, dishevelled people hurry out and away from chain-link holding pens. In terms of thematic consistency, this is exactly the sort of the-future-is-now moment I expect from a series that, in its best episodes, talked about mankind's propensity for self-immolation.

Terminator: Dark Fate - ORDERLY DISPOSAL

On the one hand, Linda Hamilton is back, crashing cars and unloading absurd shotguns at surprisingly spry cyborgs. On the other, Terminator: Dark Fate's robot confrontations look completely bereft of physics, substituting grinding, hammering machinery for the kind of weightless elasticity you expect from a substandard X-Men sequel. Cameron should've given John Hyams a ring instead.

Terminator Genisys

In an attempt to kick-off a new string of sequels Terminator Genisys takes the series back to zero, showing us the exact moment John Connor won the Battle of Armageddon by driving up to Skynet's front door hidden in the back of a truck. The Terminator posited a desperate future conflict in which mankind was reduced to the level of vermin. Conversely, Alan Taylor's smudged photostat is full of protein shook bruisers confident enough to charge directly at abstract art shapes armed with laser cannons.

To broker the handover, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as broadly the same T-800 seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Christened Pops by his bratty VIP, Schwarzenegger gets to play old and malfunctioning, a decrepit cyborg used to punching his motorised bones back into shape. Although his voice chip is stuck blurting out a couple of default phrases, Schwarzenegger is easily the best thing about the film, the impassive father figure taken to an absurd, indestructible conclusion.

Given that she's spent a decade in the company of a killing machine, you might expect Emilia Clarke's Sarah Connor to be steel. She's not. Instead, this deliberately cute, diminutive Sarah is a strange combination of T2's punk John Connor and the pressing need to please little boys grappling with the idea that girls are no longer icky.

Clarke's performance is Linda Hamilton's Virgin Mary reconfigured as something from the worrying end of the anime spectrum, a woman who is simultaneously infantilised and sexualised. The latter reading made explicit by a time travel episode that's treated like a skinny dip and the longing looks fired Connors way by a pre-teen Kyle Reese (Bryant Prince). As if to hammer home the idea that all of this is written in the stars, Young Kyle is practically dribbling any time Sarah is in his eyeline.

For his second attempt at burying a beloved 1980s film series, Jai Courtney plays Kyle Reese as an impatient prom date. It's a bold choice. James Cameron and Michael Biehn elected to portray a man who'd grown up in radioactive ruins as twitchy and feral, a bestial presence that didn't so much move as slink. Looking for a fresh hook, T5's screenwriters have lasered in on that moment in The Terminator were Reese clumsily reveals his virginity, elevating this sweaty desire to his sole, motivating characteristic.

Basically, Reese doesn't have anything else to do but look beefy and complain. He's surplus to requirement. Reese has fell through the decades to arrive at a point were he's no longer calamity's messenger. Sarah already knows more than he does and has a Terminator Guardian to boot. Perhaps recognising that their leading man is a spare, Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier's screenplay gives Reese the framing monologue and a mutation that allows him to glimpse memories from alternative, concurrent timelines.

Most depressingly of all, Terminator Genisys is a case study in how sequel inflation can numb the experience. T5's Terminators aren't death rendered in metal, they're end of level bosses. Excluding the drone-like Endos that buzz around Skynet's time travel compound, T5 has no less than seven distinct infiltrators going about their business. The singular threat of a Panzer tank sheathed in flesh is gone, replaced with a succession of computer-generated goons that are each dispatched in flat, unconvincing ways.

Lee Byung-hun's T-1000 signs off in a particularly ignominious fashion. A terrible shame since Lee is the only actor who appears to have given any thought to the interior life of something invincible. Instead of just standing there like stone absorbing damage, Lee undulates around sustained fire. It's a movement decision that suggests a creature that finds being shot irritating rather than ruinous.

T5 quickly loses interest in its mercury man, trading in Robert Patrick's Vulcanian demise for a sequence in which the chromed metal monster is transformed into drowning dirt. It doesn't help that the broad idea behind the termination is straight out of a T2 tie-in comic published by Malibu in the mid-90s. It wasn't convincing then and it isn't convincing now.

Kalogridis and Lussier's screenplay demonstrates evidence of a deep dive into ancillary Terminator mythology and little else. The future war opener is a garbled lift from Randall Frakes' novelization of the second film (itself based on early drafts of James Cameron and William Wisher's screenplay), while the battle between two digitally augmented Arnolds is straight out of Cameron's rejected T2 pitch bin. Terminator Genisys is a work mired in brand and its perceived importance, content to cram the screen with loaned out moments shorn of context, excitement and threat.

INVINCIBLE JUNK

It's a shame we've got to endure several more sequels after Terminator: Genisys, John Connor as a bastardised electronic murderer would be a fitting end to this increasing ordinary series. It weaponises the idea of sequels, and their incestuous, obsessive reconfiguring of already extant material.

To wit, the incessant time stream meddling by both Skynet and the human resistance has given rise to alpha being who wants to be the only thing left standing. John Connor as a temporal God of Destruction. He combines both aspects of his enemies, he is simultaneously human and machine. Invincible but scarred.

This John Connor doesn't want to save humanity, he needs to eradicate the forces that put him in this position - the futuristic hyper-computer who rules the future and the parents who conceived him. Kill them all, stamp them into dust so John Connor, seated on a throne of bones and twisted machinery, can finally feel a sense of peace.

CHEW

Schwarzenegger with whiskers bopping around a desolate post-fall landscape? We'll ignore the PG-13 rating for now and focus on how Maggie has the same visual throb as Sylvain Despretz's storyboards for Ridley Scott's MIA I Am Legend adaptation. Director Henry Hobson has priors with the apocalypse too, having designed the buzzy, black-and-white title sequence for The Last of Us.

Hot Toys MMS276 John Matrix (Commando)

Sabotage

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a Great Ape in charge of a team of heavily armed Juggalos. Sabotage plays like an old man fantasy with Schwarzenegger's Breacher as the elder gent able to run intellectual rings around the kids. His age makes him mythic and untouchable in their eyes, an abstract idea of masculine supremacy. The kids fucked up though. Although an idea of fraternity or family is repeatedly stressed, usually by the subordinates, it's clear Schwarzenegger has other ideas. Initially Sabotage seems to be a Friday the 13th instalment with Schwarzenegger as a monstrous bogeyman ticking off his disappointing children.

Sabotage, as it turns out, is instead about how disposable everybody else in your life is when measured against loved ones. Schwarzenegger allows his team to eat itself, but doesn't actively participate. Neither does he intervene. He's above the infighting because he's locked in somewhere else, waiting. Skip Woods and David Ayer's ending was allegedly hijacked, pruned and re-arranged to shift overt villainy off Schwarzenegger. All the nervous studio interference has done though is add an air of indifference. Breacher is truly, exceptionally, callous. Schwarzenegger as a giant, flushed knuckle that'll step over the bodies of people prepared to die for him if it'll equalise a personal situation. The team might love him but he doesn't love them.

Ayers shoots Schwarzenegger as an icon. The star's age isn't avoided or concealed, it's almost fetishised. Repeated close-ups let you drink in the decades. Ayers holding on an eyeline that looks more and more like Clint Eastwood's with every passing year. Arnold is shot like he's The Dark Knight Returns' Bruce Wayne, an ageing weightlifter who gets drunk to dredge up the most awful memories he can. Even his haircut is great, a self-administered close crop that undoubtedly reeks of Brylcreem. Sabotage is easily the best post-Governor Schwarzenegger film simply because it approaches the star as a relic. He's from another time. This mechanical male doesn't fit in with his beer-swilling tat-frat. They're flawed and messy. In comparison, Schwarzenegger is steel.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is James Cameron's attempt at realigning the collective male psyche after the excesses of the 1980s muscle killers. Maybe he was motivated by guilt? After all, this is a model of masculinity that Cameron himself had a hand in pioneering. His Terminator acted like a slasher villain and inadvertently became the gold standard for the remote action heroes of the Reagan period. Likewise, Cameron's screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II, as interpreted by Sylvester Stallone and George P Cosmatos, took a damaged Vietnam veteran and allowed him to 'win', transforming him into a poster boy for popped veins and steely, supplemented sinew. These men were isolated, emotionally distant and obsessed with automatic weaponry. Relationships, if they even registered, were usually just revenge prompts.

T2 wasn't the first time Cameron tried to steer movie manliness in a healthier direction. Michael Biehn's characters in The Terminator and Aliens were both professional soldiers able to comfortably co-operate with women. Sarah Connor and Ripley weren't considered prizes, they were partners in a capable, multi-disciplined collective. Crucially, their strength wasn't shown to undermine Reese or Hicks' masculinity, it informed it. In Cameron's films the heroes and heroines aren't islands, they're components in a greater whole. The group survives, the individual dies. Unfortunately, Biehn's lithe intensity never stuck. His confident, secure characters were either upstaged by monolithic co-stars or de-emphasised by plot machinations. To push the ideal further, Cameron needed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For this sequel, Cameron and co-screenwriter William Wisher Jr gradually deconstruct the idea of the Terminator. After a rock and roll introduction the character is slowly shorn of the kit associated with the first film's mechanical assassin. First he loses his sunglasses, smashed by an institute orderly's bandaged forearm. With his Persol Rattis junked, Schwarzenegger's key colour also changes. After the Pescadero chase the Terminator is no longer lit to be a waxy blue, now flesh tones are emphasised to match his emerging, artificial, humanity. Next, Terminator gives up his motorbike, the two-seater an impractical way to transport two adults and a child. Terminator ends up driving a string of shitty trucks and estate cars, most notably a wood panelled Ford station wagon.

This mundanity stresses Cameron and Wisher's core idea - fatherhood as a high ideal, positioned in opposition to shallow nonchalance. Schwarzenegger is no longer an impassive leather murderer, he's someone's dorky Dad, regurgitating slang he doesn't understand. He's an incredulous focal point for the child to bounce his personality off. This isn't commodity cool, Cameron isn't trying to sell a particular product. He's taking the constituent parts of the 1980s action hero and reorganising them into something mythic and immovable. If we agree, to our horror, that action movies are able to provide instructive behavioural models for little boys, then T2 is explicitly saying that emotional distance is a sham. Much better to engage, and allow yourself to be considered weak or compromised. Being a man isn't about expensive toys or mistreating women, it's about the ability to be a stable, invested presence in someone else's life.

Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian is about a life completely dedicated to equalising a situation. Thulsa Doom, an otherworldly, apparently eternal magician, ransacks Conan's village, slaughtering his parents and his people. The child doesn't say a word. Instead he drinks in his enemy's face and flag, making them his motor. Sold into slavery and forced to suffer punishing manual labour, Conan abides, using the appalling situation to transform his body into the tool he needs for revenge.

Conan the Barbarian endures and enchants because it is about a man who is completely unbeatable. Every step in his life is designed to bring him back to the snake priest who ruined it. He doesn't run from his destiny, he embraces it. He races forwards, screaming, sword held high. Conan doesn't even chaff, you have to seek out a Director's Cut to hear him reflect and complain. The film, like the rest of John Milius' work, taps right into a basic, almost embarrassing facet of unreconstructed masculinity - the desire to be remote and unconquerable. It's male emotional autism on a vast, panoramic scale. If, as JG Ballard hailed it, Mad Max 2 is punk's Sistine Chapel then Conan is the heavy metal equivalent of Michelangelo's David.

In his break-out role, the Austrian Oak is photographed like an expensive special effect. He exists centre frame in long, loving takes. There's a vein of body shock running through Arnold Schwarzenegger's first few screen appearances, as if filmmakers struggled to properly contextualise this horrifying figure. Hercules in New York found him sexually overwhelming, the camera pushed in porno close like some marginal other trying to grasp at him. The Terminator presented him as a mechanical horror - a gleaming metal skeleton coated in puffy musculature to facilitate efficient gun reloads.

Milius seems to regard the star as a natural phenomena. Milius and Duke Callaghan shoot Schwarzenegger like a mountain. A still, emotionless thing comfortable with silence and contemplation. The Martian deserts of Spain and the visual language of Sergio Leone is re-purposed to tell a pagan rock-opera in which long-haired roadies battle it out for mystical supremacy. Conan isn't about talking or explaining. He's all doing. Everything is communicated physically, his thought process reported through tight close-ups on Schwarzenegger's face bracketed by Basil Poledouris' pounding, prehistoric score. Milius wasn't considering Arnold as the heavily accented body builder he was, he saw him as the larger-than-life megastar he would become. This complete confidence actualises Schwarzenegger in the same way that The Wheel of Pain warped the young barbarian.

Commando

Commando feels like the first time a film specifically built itself around the emerging star persona of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the Dino De Laurentiis barbarian films, Schwarzenegger was filling a pre-existing role. When he played the lead in The Terminator Schwarzenegger may have altered James Cameron's idea of who his cyborg assassin should be, but again the role predated the glamour. Commando though seems to be pointedly playing around with the few bankable - pitchable - attributes the actor had displayed.

First and foremost, John Matrix is a strongman. Every obstacle he comes across is expertly dismantled by his huge muscled paws. His feats of strength are so outlandish that Schwarzenegger begins to resemble a cartoonish idea of muscle might. He's basically The Incredible Hulk with an agenda. Commando is also happy to replay several beats and ideas from Terminator, most obviously in the regurgitation of a few of that film's more memorable zings, but also in how Matrix stalks his prey. When pursuing his enemies Schwarzenegger tends to slide back into his surveillance camera acting, scanning with his eyes, then allowing his head to follow robotically. Commando is an iterated example of the mechanical otherness that defined Arnold Schwarzenegger's early roles - the persona beginning to metamorphose from a hunter killer into something human.

TIME WILL DIGNIFY ANYTHING

Trailer for Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa's upcoming documentary Milius. In his autobiography, Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals a deep affection for his Conan the Barbarian director. Boringly short on Hollywood gossip, Schwarzenegger's book is primarily concerned with his own self-actualisation, general boasting, and the path that lead him into politics.

The most notable director in his oeuvre, James Cameron, is talked about as someone Schwarzenegger struggled to relate to - Cameron rejected Schwarzenegger's ET the Extra-Terrestrial inspired suggestions (Terminator should drink beer and get buzzed!), and seemed to spend the majority of The Terminator's shoot moaning about lenses.

Although complementary of Cameron's work realising the 1984 classic, there's a sense that Schwarzenegger sees more of himself in John Milius. Like his star, Milius delighted in saying outrageous things. From Total Recall My Unbelievably True Life Story:

"John liked to call himself a Zen fascist, and he'd brag that he was so far to the right that he wasn't even a Republican. Some people in town thought he was sick. But he was such a fantastic writer even the liberals would call him for help on their scripts, like Warren Beatty with Reds."

Schwarzenegger also describes Milius defending the actor against accusations of Nazism from Conan producer Dino De Laurentiis:

""There is only one Nazi on this team. And that is me. I am the Nazi!" For the rest of the production, he would go to odd antique stores and buy these little lead figurines of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and Francisco Franco and put them on Dino's desk."

For a right-wing ball breaker like Schwarzenegger, Milius must have seemed like an ideological superhero.

Trailer via Supervillain

The Last Stand

Ten years out of the game, Arnold Schwarzenegger creaks back into the limelight with The Last Stand, an undercooked audition piece for South Korean director Kim Ji-woon. The Last Stand is your typical structurally incompetent action flick, devoting far too much time to a weak-piss federal investigation that has all the flair of a semen swab procedural. Forest Whitaker acts big in blue environments heaving with bland cubicle cops; dishing out exposition and pulling a series of incredulous faces as a cartel brat speeds towards Sheriff Schwarzenegger's hamlet in a ludicrous super-car.

The Last Stand fits into a weird Schwarzenegger sub-genre where the former Mr Universe is expected to walk and talk like he's a regular human being. Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger hasn't blossomed as an actor. Small talk with the village locals plays pained. Placing Schwarzenegger in an interchangeable people-person role feels like a fundamental misreading of what he is capable of. He's not a chatter, or a pal, he's a brooding monster with a one track mind. The Last Stand plays with this idea lightly. If you were being generous, you could take a step back and contextualise the broken readings and artificiality as a plastic personality Schwarzenegger has constructed over his deeper, meaner identity.

The Last Stand limps along until all the frayed little threads come together for the final act. A man down and preparing for invasion, Schwarzenegger tells his favourite deputy to expect total fucking mayhem. Kim Ji-woon doesn't disappoint. The Last Stand transforms into a cartoon that plays large off silly, incidental details. Kim brings his outsider eye to a small town shoot-out that touches on a few of the more alien aspects of the American persona. Ancient Southern Ladies ruthlessly protect their bric-a-brac crap, town fatsos refuse to have their eating agenda interrupted, and naturalised immigrants feel obliged to work twice as hard as everyone else. The cartel's road rocket also finds its way into a dense corn field for an anti-action finale that seems to be saying something about the potential for working class unity to upset the machinations of spoilt, drug pushing little shits.

Despite his arthritic shuffle, Schwarzenegger is still physically impressive. His shape has matured into a towering muscle breeze block, kin to Stallone's hideous appearance in Rambo. Stick Schwarzenegger in a perilous situation and ask him to say something glib and there are flashes of the 80s action icon. In future, It'd probably be best to put Arnold over like he's Hulk Hogan returning to the WWF. Keep him large, and make the young'uns sell like crazy.

The Expendables 2

I was quite fond of The Expendables. Sylvester Stallone's 80s action mega-mix neatly juggled a reductive police action plot, with some gonzo character moments. Each actor appeared to be playing an amped up version of themselves: Stallone was codgery but desperate to please; Statham, unlucky in love with beautiful brunettes; Jet Li working overtime to support two families; Stone Cold Steve Austin quite happy to strike a woman. It was a film with a pro-wrestling mindset, turning up personality tics and tricks against a backdrop of Commie stomping and big government mistrust. All that and Sly seemed to have spent hours cruising YouTube for bite sized attention grabbers to co-opt for the big screen. Expendables was a piece engaged with the type of viewer who delights at record breaking pistol reloads, or seeing an American twenty-somethings - who are pretending to be Russian - chopping up the landscape with their latest combat shotgun. It was crass and shallow, but betrayed a slathering, uncompromising affection for also-ran 80s thugs and their modern equivalents.

The Expendables 2 takes a different tact, perhaps trying to recontextualise the sappy, barely reconstructed personas that Sly and the gang struggled with during the early 1990s. Stallone's doomed relationship with a perky surrogate son pokes at the same mutant identity areas as the last film, but the execution is clumsy. The film plays like a TV movie, with a plot better suited to a modern-day A-Team pilot than an all-in genre stomp. Director Simon West lets the Planet Hollywood trifecta burn screen time cracking gentle jokes in static set-ups whilst Jason Statham is relegated to one tiny feature thump - a knife ninja remix of Clint Eastwood's entrance in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

The rest of the original cast get it worse. The wonderful Terry Crews is made to play second-fiddle (in the realm of enormous firearms) to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Li bails out after the first mission. Lundgren is a mere background player here, doomed to blow kisses at Stallone's future squeeze Yu Nan. The underdog charm of the first film is jettisoned then in favour of (fading) A-list indifference. It's fun to see Schwarzenegger marching forwards firing a Call of Duty gun without blinking, but it's a fleeting joy. The only person really trying is Jean-Claude Van Damme. His character, Jean Vilain, seems to be the only role still operating on the first film's private-life-as-action-reality premise. His sinewy, euro-trash arrogance perfectly suited to make adversarial moves against Stallone's dull macho internalism. For all its faults Expendables 2 is one of the few films that really taps into Van Damme's dickish, sport shagger appeal. If we are to suffer an Expendables 3, Stallone would be well advised to seek assistance from some of the behind-the-scenes stars of 80s action cinema. I'm sure Steven E de Souza could knock up a suitably hyperbolic script for jailbird John McTiernan to direct.

WRONG

Criminally, Schwarzenegger only reads two chapters on the audiobook version of his autobiography Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story. Here are some edited highlights from the book The Guardian is calling "(the) most unpleasant, creepiest celebrity autobiography ever!"

MAXIM

Schwarzenegger hauls his old man body around for The Last Stand, a border town beat 'em up with a plot that sounds like Rio Bravo knocking heads with a seventies future shocker. For his big comeback Schwarzenegger's recruited director Kim Ji-woon, a genre man with gems like A Bittersweet Life and I Saw the Devil on his CV. Proof positive that Arnold's knack for recognising out of town talent hasn't deserted him.

Genesis - The Brazilian

I've spent the evening reading Steven E de Souza and Frank Darabont's unproduced Commando II script - this is the track they advise you to crank up to get a sense of John Matrix's world. Obviously the script is completely amazing and features scene after scene of Schwarzenegger saying blunt things and frowning. Zinger wise, the highlight has to be Arnold's aside after brutalising the door staff of an exclusive members only club: "I don't know why they call them bouncers. They don't bounce." Elsewhere, our hero escapes a high-tech death corridor by creating an anti-laser umbrella out of Janitorial supplies and a few rest-room mirrors. Take that technology! For his big finish, Schwarzenegger gains entry to the big bad's evil Contra compound by disguising himself as a blushing bride. Real shame it never got made.

Also Van Damme

Sylvester Stallone hands stewardship duties on The Expendables over to Simon West, a former Jerry Bruckheimer stable shooter who peaked with 1997's endlessly rewatchable Con Air. I've never felt like Mr West got his due for Con Air. The film is routinely heaped in with Michael Bay's usual one-note action sludge, despite having a sly self-awareness, and operating sense of humour. It resembles Bayhem, that's undeniable, but it has an ironic streak that'd have Michael scrunching his face up in confusion. Also Van Damme.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

With a lengthy stint of dilute stinkers to his name, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was Arnold Schwarzenegger's last starring role before he embarked upon a political career that saw him elected as the 38th Governor of California. As such, T3 can be read as both a payday sequel to stuff Schwarzenegger's coffers, and a public relations push for the star's impending aspirations. Certainly, this terminator resembles little more than a flagging, toothless repurposing of Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2: Judgment Day performance.

Although in similar shape to his mid-forties, T2 self, Schwarzenegger sports a deep red tan that clashes with his leather-daddy outfit and any pretence that he's actually from a terrible future. Director Jonathan Mostow also fails to give the star any killer establishing shots that aren't immediately voided by ugly, after-the-fact tinkering. It's a kick to see Schwarzenegger juggling a coffin full of rocket launchers like a futureshock Django, but the moment is mangled by Mostow's need to paste on post-process slow motion.

The film rolls on and on, never finding any way to make Schwarzenegger look iconic. Instead he's a bumbling old man, hair permanently fixed in a state of greased shock, snowboarder sunglasses stapled to his face. He doesn't look cool, he looks absurd. Factor in a reprogramming shorthand that replicates the near-human state of T2's father figure, a suffocating rash of Schwarzenegger career quotes, and a long streak of bawdy, contemptuous humour at the killing machine's expense - "Talk to the hand!" - and you have a performance that wades into full-on parody.

Elsewhere, Edward Furlong's vandal John Connor has mutated into a trembling loser played by Nick Stahl. Stahl's Connor is a messianic bum, taken to crashing motorcycles and day-labouring after T2's theatrical ending robbed him of his ambition. Stahl burns screentime furrowing his brow and looking confused. There's zero sense he's capable of leading anything. Indeed as soon as the Terminator shows up he instantly abdicates any sense of command. Much more convincing as an impending Techno-Caesar is Claire Danes's Kate Brewster, a revision role perhaps originally written to be Sarah Connor.

Although by no means as capable as Linda Hamilton, Brewster does occasionally ask questions and take the initiative, something the dumbfounded Connor never quite manages. The suggestion here seems to be that Connor is the cuckolded sap pushed front-and-centre by his Brewster wife to be the male poster image for her own military ambitions. Cameron's films posited Connor as a scarred and cold Übermensch, forged by an abusive upbringing to be the shitkicker Christ that topples the machines. T3's sole shot of Future Connor is a scruffy old Stahl limply leading a victory chant whilst wearing oversized fatigues and a worried expression. Fuck that guy.

The weak linking continues with Kristanna Loken's irritable TX, a female shaped terminator programmed with the need to writhe in ecstasy whenever she tastes her target's blood. An early emphasis on the TX being aware of the uses a sexualised identity can afford her does raise the intermittently interesting idea that she might try and seduce her quarry. In the end though, all this cat housing amounts to nothing. Incredibly, the idea of a mechanised honeytrap was better explored in Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, at least there Bay was able to conjure a terrifying sense of destructive, sexual otherness. In T3 any such posturing is ultimately revealed to be cynical titillation.

Unfortunately the TX wasn't conceived to be interesting, she exists solely to turn up late and harass our heroes forward. There's an overwhelming sense that very little imagination is being flexed on her behalf. Her basic physiology is founded on a solid metal core, so immediately she's less interesting / invincible than the T-1000. Cameron's Terminator films also afforded their villains scenes of detective work and incidental murder. Threat was close and constantly stressed. A few brief assassinations aside, T3 only manages to burp up a sequence were TX idly sets some trees on fire after getting her ineffectual plasma weapon junked. She's vapour. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines simply doesn't give a shit. It knows you'll watch it out of some dimwitted allegiance to past glories. Why should it even try? It's a sequel designed entirely to be just another instalment in an unending multi-media franchise.