Breakdown (1997)

The breakdown of the title is of the car variety, not the emotional kind. A swanky new jeep belonging to Jeff and Amy Taylor (Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan), in the desert, to be exact; but that's only the beginning of their problems. He gets taken for something he isn't, and his wife gets used as leverage. It's about the lengths someone will go to in order to save the one they love. The more desperate the protagonist gets, the more desperate and ruthless the antagonists grow. It doesn’t break the mold of the genre, and it stretches believability a little as it gets nearer the ending, but Russell is good and the music does its job admirably (courtesy of Basil Poledouris).

3 donut dollars out of 5

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

There's a very real possibility that the third film in the series got green lit simply to enable the producers to create a sexy female Terminator that they called the Terminatrix. I fear someone got paid a sizeable bag of money to come up with that. As a film, it fails. Using Arnie as the butt of some immature visual gags was the least of its problems. The acting was bad. The story was flat-out boring, except for the final twist. It out-shits even Alien 4 for being unnecessary and unwarranted. They even screwed up the sexy. The Terminatrix (sorry to use it twice) lacks any kind of allure, even while jaywalking with her ass out. Bad. Bad. Bad.

1½ coffin carrying idiots out of 5