I'm surprised none of the film criticism surrounding T2 has picked up on one of the major flaws. The boy's acting seems so poor to me, now. It's as if he is just reading out lines from the script. Is it just me who feels this way?
shareYes he was awful and so was the script. A completely different feel from the original. The original is a classic suspense game of cat and mouse featuring one of the scariest bad asses in film. The second one is a joke with zero sense of danger (you knew Arnold was going to win) and that terrible child actor was going to survive.
It's hilarious that people think it is better because of its technical achievements. Overall the movie felt like a PG-13 kids movie sequel we get these days (the mild violence really doesn't deserve an R rating at all). This was probably the catalyst for all those shitty ass sequels of good R rated action movies. But all the nostalgia nerds are hypocrites who complain about that happening now to their beloved franchises, yet love this trash.
Furlong was solid... the sequel being more of an action movie than the previous one is entirely due to cameron... he changed his aesthetic... you can even see it with his Aliens movie... turned a space horror movie into a family action movie... same formula as here... ad-hoc family comes together to protect the kids from the big bad scaries...
Disney...
The future was 1991 old man. T2 is a great movie anytime and T1 you need to be in a certain type of mood not to turn it off and do something else
shareNot that much different than Newt in Aliens. It's just a kid going through a traumatic experience. Many children seem like bad actors, even though they aren't, because of a limited vocabulary and experience mindset, which can also translate to strange body movement and facial expression as well.
shareI accept that it's harder to find good child actors (for obvious reasons), but bad acting is bad acting and it can ruin a film. I saw a clip of The Phantom Menace, the other day, and realised that film suffers from the same problem. You'd think these big budget franchises would be able to cast decent child actors.
shareHis delivery can be imperfect (to put it mildly), but in my eyes he brings the right attitude and vulnerability to the role. Sure, a skilled kid actor could've been more believable in many ways, but Furlong is more than serviceable to me.
By the way, I haven't seen his acting itself get criticized as much as much I’ve seen him get called the film's weakest link mostly based on how whiny people find him.
uh. . . no, that was the complaint from day 1. Furlong was the Jar Jar Binks of this movie. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life, and probably a better actor now, but he sucked in this movie.
share"uh. . . no, that was the complaint from day 1. Furlong was the Jar Jar Binks of this movie. "
Come on! He's not as bad or annoying as Jar Jar Binks! You're blowing it out of proportion with that statement!
Agreed. Distractingly bad. And the script made him annoying.
shareI don't know what people had against Furlong. His being a street kid was the reason he got the role. Maybe the audience was too used to seeing Hollywood types trying to pass themselves off as street kids.
share...or maybe people were averse to his terrible acting in this film. Honestly, I don’t blame Furlong. It’s the film makers fault. How does the casting for a major movie get handled so badly?
I was watching The Babadook recently and thinking the kid in this relatively low budget movie turns in a credible performance. The director obviously took care to cast the right actor so as not to ruin the film.
He was a bad actor because he wasn't an actor at all. He was literally just some kid off the street that the T2 casting director happened upon one day. He sucked, which is Furlong's fault, and his character sucked (and was highly annoying), which is James Cameron's fault. The John Connor character should have been 16 or 17 years old, and should have been played by a real actor in his late teens or early 20s.
shareI thought he was alright. I get where everyone is coming from but any kid with a PE shirt is good with me. And what 12 year old isn’t annoying?
share"And what 12 year old isn’t annoying?"
Most kids that age are annoying, but there was no reason the character had to be that age. 16 or 17 would have been a lot better, and played by someone who was actually an actor, and in his late teens or early 20s.
That is a good point.
shareThe father/son dynamic between the Terminator and a 17yo pretty much grown man, wouldn´t have worked.
shareThe father/son dynamic sucked, but if that's what they wanted to do, it would have worked fine with a 16- or 17-year-old. Just watch any sitcom that features a family with kids that includes a 16- or 17-year-old high school kid. The early seasons of Family Ties (Michael Gross and Michael J. Fox's characters) is one of countless examples.
shareJohn Connor was more vulnerable as a child also. Story-wise it made more sense for the T-1000 to come back and kill a 10 year old as opposed to a 17yo.
shareThe difference in vulnerability between a 10-year-old and a 17-year-old from the perspective of a T1000 is meaningless. Either one is like shooting fish in a barrel if they don't have a protector. The T1000 killed lots of people with utter ease in this movie, all of them adults, and some of them were even trained and armed (like cops).
I suspect the only reason Cameron decided on casting a 13-year-old was to appeal to the 12-and-under crowd. The T2 line of toys was certainly lucrative. It was just as stupid and annoying as when George Lucas cast a little kid to play Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.