There is a perplexing brand of moviegoer who will vehemently apologize for any special effects–laden summer movie, even if the filmmakers completely botched their $100 million mandate to make something entertaining. "Wolverine wasn't that bad," they'll say, as though their children had starred in the movie and so they're proprietarily afraid to acknowledge its raw, turgid awfulness. Even these apologists will have a hard time justifying Terminator Salvation.

Christian Bale turns in his worst performance ever as John Connor, a future-Rambo who is single-mindedly obsessed with killing the machines that have taken over the world. The problem is that Connor has no personality—Bale's leaked, curse-laden rant from last spring about a lighting technician accidentally stepping into his line of sight has more complexity than any of his scenes in this film. (The bad war-movie dialogue isn't doing him any favors: "My men died down in that hole!") And nobody else does any better. It's a pit of mediocrity: Common lives up to his name, Sam Worthington grimaces lamely, and even Danny Elfman's score is the most uninspired mess he's ever produced.

A few scenes are exciting, particularly a mid-movie fight with a tricky-shinned gigantic robot—but thanks to bad pacing and weak cinematography, they feel exciting in spite of the director's best efforts, rather than because of them. The plot is somehow entirely constructed from holes. There are a couple of twists in the middle of all the screaming and 'splosions, but they're not particularly clever. This film isn't a worthy successor to the weird horror-movie vibe of the first Terminator or the eye-popping action of T2, but the really sad thing is that it's not even as good as the crap-tastic mess that was Terminator 3. There's no possible justification for taking a beloved sci-fi film franchise like this and just shitting banality all over it.