"You have been programmed with a lot of confidence chips."

Seldom are movies so painful. How can a movie fail so utterly? It's a question that boggles my mind. Movies are great if they have finely drawn characters, a believable plot, an interesting exploration of ideas, and an effective technical execution. But all a movie really needs to be is entertaining. Clearly that was this film's only goal, as it seeks to be no more than a rousing action adventure in the desert. So how, then, could this have turned out to be the monstrous failure that it is? This movie was downright unbearable. I've seen worse movies, but I don't know when I've seen one that hurt so much.

The "plot" involves a bunch of cyborgs in the desert who apparently need human blood to survive. They band together and plan an attack on humanity. Meanwhile, a "good" cyborg shows up and, with the aid of a human woman with strength and athleticism that appears to outmatch that of any of the cyborgs, beat them all up. That's basically the entire plot. There's a lot of running around in the desert. There's a lot of thoroughly uninteresting fight scenes. And spliced in between are some of the most pathetic lines of dialogue I've ever heard. The super woman, for example, gets all upset and shouts "No!" a bunch of times when she learns the good cyborg doesn't care what happens to him after he fulfills his programmed mission of killing all the other cyborgs. Why the heck does she care? He's a robot. I guess if you're a robot that looks like Kris Kristofferson, people expect more out of you. And yet, this just may be the best scene in the movie, judging via process of elimination, because it's the only one that isn't resolutely focused on having people run around, utter lines like "You're gonna die," and have lame fights with each other.

I couldn't wait for the movie to end. I was so anxious, the absurdly abrupt ending (it looks like the filmmakers ran out of money and just quit midstream with the closing narration, "We had some more adventures," during which we can only assume the plot was wrapped up) didn't bother me one bit.