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Rating: 1 out of 5
Oh, Universal Soldier. How did I think you were a good movie when I was younger? Also, how in the hell does a movie so lousy produce six sequels. Yes! Six total sequels in this film series and I have a feeling that it’s not done yet. Like many movie characters, this series seems to come back from the dead more time than Jason and his hockey mask come back from being stabbed.
Let’s go back to 1992 when the first Universal Soldier came out, and this review will be based on that film. The film stars the one and only, Muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and boxing powerhouse who killed Apollo Creed, Dolph Lundgren. Okay, this movie starts off in 1969, when a U.S. Army team is ordered to secure a village against North Vietnamese forces. Luc Deveraux (Van Damme) discovers members of his squad and villagers murdered. As he looks for answers, he sees that his sergeant, Andrew Scott (Lundgren), has gone entirely INSANE and killed everyone while removing all their ears and making a necklace out of them. The dude is straight-up CRAZY! During a confrontation, Scott has taken a young couple hostage. Scott executes the man and orders Deveraux to kill the woman. Deveraux refuses and tries to save the girl, but she is killed by Scott’s grenade. After shooting each other to death, Deveraux and Scott’s corpses are recovered by a second squad and reported as MIA. They are cryogenically frozen and reanimated decades later, with their memories lost and selected for the “Universal Soldier” (UniSol) program, an elite counter-terrorism unit. After one mission, Deveraux begins to have flashbacks of his former life. While trying to stop TV reporter Veronica Roberts, they team up intending to uncover the program’s truth and get Deveraux home. The only thing is that Scott has regained his memories and believes he is still in the jungles of Vietnam and will stop at nothing to kill Deveraux.
I don’t know where to begin with this movie. I would say that the whole science fiction aspect of being cryogenically frozen was interesting, but it wasn’t. I don’t know what the little kid in me saw. I think it was all action, and even that was blah now that I watched this movie again. Back to the whole being frozen stuff. I understand being frozen, but they were frozen for almost 30 years! They really didn’t explain how they achieve this until the very end, and even that didn’t make sense. So, they are dead but not really dead, and that must be some great aging lotion. Why would you have someone frozen for thirty years and then bring them back? They were literal zombies but alive. It made no sense. I was baffled.
The movie shifts from having soldiers that I feel like you could train and invest heavily in some new equipment to having Deveraux and Veronica go on this road trip where they true to find answers and escape the onslaught of gunfire against them. The whole diner scene was okay. The dude eats a shit ton of food and then fights everyone because he can’t pay. Now, when you see two to three dudes get their ass handed to them, why are you going to jump in and think you will change the fight. This always makes no sense.
The whole movie was just off the pace. It was like, he escaped, let us find him, and let’s kill him. Oh, he escaped again; let’s find him and let’s kill him. Also, make sure the soldiers don’t get overheated because they wouldn’t be able to take it. What was up with the whole serum? Did it make them stronger? Did it make them somewhat human and cure them? Many questions and no answers.
As far as the acting goes, no one really did a good job. Maybe Lundgren because he was over the top and played a person who has seen some things in Vietnam. He was good for maybe two minutes. Van Damme said maybe ten words in the whole movie. He mostly got naked, did some kicks, and got naked again.
I still can’t believe that this film started a franchise that is up to six movies overall. If you want some mind-numbing action with zero dialogue and Van Damme showing his ass, then this is the movie for you. Let’s not even get into the scientific aspect of the whole thing because it will make ZERO sense. There are far better films in the world than this one.
