Instead of the actual title, or the alternate one (above), the latest chapter in the 'Terminator' franchise could have just as easily been subtitled...

T3: Kate Brewster Has A Really Really Bad Day

The animal clinic where Kate (Claire Danes) works is destroyed by a rampaging Terminatrix, her fiancee is killed, she finds out it's her destiny to marry a drifter loser named John Connor (Nick Stahl), her dad bites the bullet, and if that's not enough heartache... the world is gonna end in a few short hours.

In comparison, it kinda makes that "bad hair day" she had last week seem pleasantly refreshing.

The first 'Terminator' had some nifty ideas - about time paradoxes and the like - to wrap your mind around, T2 had cutting-edge special effects, but T3 displays little of the panache nor the eye-popping "I've never seen anything like this!" FX spectacle of its predecessors.

The plot is more or less a retread of T2 - top-of-the-line Terminator sent back in time to kill Connor, obsolete T-800 model (in the form of Schwarzenegger) sent back to protect humanity's leader in the upcoming war against the machines - and, while the special effects are serviceable, they simply don't have the impact they did in T2. The CGI "machines" have left us jaded in the intervening twelve years.

Some plot points were way too obvious. Was it just me, or when the T-800 threw one of his battery packs out the truck window and it blew up, taking a large chunk of desert roadway with it, was your first thought also, "I guess we now know how he's going to destroy the T-X. Thank god he still has one good battery pack left, huh?"

The lack of twists and turns in the plot are filled with too many tired, wink-wink-nudge-nudge in-jokes that mostly reference the first two films.

Yes, we know the T-800 model likes to wear a lot of leather.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say.