Terminator Genisys (12A)

Directed by Alan Taylor

2/5

UTTERING the now infamous line “I’ll be back” more than 30 years ago, little did Arnold Schwarzenegger know at the time that he’d return to kill off the franchise.

This fifth instalment is a faithful recap of James Cameron’s classic Terminator films before it completely rewrites the Sarah Connor story and turns into a convoluted time-travelling mess.

Once again John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to protect his mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke). But when he arrives in 1984, Sarah is a gun-toting badass who’s fighting a shape-shifting  T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee).

She has been brought up by the T-800/Guardian (Schwarzenegger) — whom she calls “pops” — since she was nine. Sarah and Kyle then travel to 2017 to destroy Skynet by stopping the launch of its killer app Genisys, a Trojan horse which will ensure that machines take over the world. While Cameron’s films set the bar sky-high for franchises to come with a combination of mind-blowing stories and ground-breaking special effects, director Alan Taylor’s sequel is merely derivative and lacks the ingenuity and wow factor of Cameron’s work.

On the plus side it does completely ignore Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation.

Clarke convinces as Sarah Connor although she isn’t as formidable as Linda Hamilton, who truly made the role her own.

But Arnie is the saving grace — and you get three Arnie terminators for the price of one to boot. Watching him fight his younger 1984 self is quite surreal. “I’m old, not obsolete,” he tells us. But you can’t help wondering if there is any life left in the old dog yet or, if, like the T-800, he’s well past his shelf life.