By George Haerle

For Grays Harbor News Group

The first 40 minutes or so of “Terminator: Dark Fate” is surprisingly great. It recalls the original in compelling ways that a sequel should, it has a shocking and wonderfully shot opening, and the characters are genuinely intriguing.

The action scenes are gritty, well designed and well choreographed, with hard-hitting close-quarters fight scenes and a fantastic car chase. It manages to make you excited about this great new addition to the franchise, which we haven’t had since “T2” in the early 1990s.

But then, about halfway through, the movie dive-bombs like a kamikaze Terminator in a pilot’s seat (which happens so many times here that it becomes almost a gag). The second half of “Dark Fate” resembles a lousy cross between “T3: Rise of the Machines” and “Terminator: Genisys.” The action scenes become so over the top, you’d think you were watching another bad Transformers sequel.

There’s a plummeting plane sequence that tosses the characters around like rubber rag dolls and looks almost exactly like a similarly lousy scene in the awful 2017 remake of “The Mummy.” Underwater fights then take place like in a ’60s James Bond film, and the movie is then somehow mashing a level of “The Fast and the Furious” ridiculousness into something gritty and very harsh to its human characters in the first half. If the rest of the film were as tongue-in-cheek as the Furious movies, that might work, but it’s not.

Suddenly our more vulnerable protagonists can receive little to no injury from crashes and explosions, of which there are probably half a dozen in the third act alone. Parachuting Humvees get caught and hang over the side of a dam as the characters try to escape. And worst of all, when everything is said and done, it becomes apparent this is just a bad clone of “Terminator 2.”

Performance-wise, it still manages to take the cake for best Terminator sequel without the subtitle “Judgment Day.” Linda Hamilton rocks her return as Sarah Connor, who is a bit wiser and less intense from the passing years, but just as formidable toward her metallic nemeses as ever. Mackenzie Davis is pretty good as the cybernetically enhanced human Grace, who has come from an alternate future to protect Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes, who is believable in her role) from a new Terminator: the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), the deadliest model yet.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is back to his best form as another T-800 Terminator, and it’s great to see him truly shine in the role once more. The biggest problem is his character arc and the explanation for his presence, which is so wacky and contradictory to everything we’ve seen in the previous films, it just becomes a massive plot hole.

Luna’s Rev-9 is the best antagonist we have had since Robert Patrick in “Terminator 2.” This Terminator model can replicate politeness and expressions, but Luna does it like a serial killer attempting to portray himself as humanly as possible, but with complete emptiness in his eyes.

But, while the filmmakers surely wanted more sequels beyond this one, Luna probably won’t get the chance to reprise his role given the poor box-office numbers and middling response to this one. Luna, Hamilton and Schwarzenegger almost manage to save the movie, but director Tim Miller either received too much meddling from the studio and producers or, more likely, the film’s five writers (five!) bungled the script’s second half.

If you’re a big Terminator fan, a cheap matinee or a Redbox rental is recommended at most — and only if you want to see the few great ideas and performances that stand out in a very mediocre film. Beyond that, it’s time for this franchise to be terminated once and for all.

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“Terminator: Dark Fate” is currently playing at the Riverside Cinemas, 1017 S. Boone St. in Aberdeen.

George Haerle holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing for media and lives in Cosmopolis.

Paramount Pictures Linda Hamilton rocks her return as Sarah Connor in “Terminator: Dark Fate.”