Review: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)
Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Scott Adkins
Director: John Hyams
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Sci-Fi | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning opened in North American theaters on November 30th..
I’m not entirely sure what my expectations were going in to Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning as I try to relieve myself from the burden of expectation before viewing any film, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t expecting the strange mixture of cinematic references and testosterone-laden battles between large sweaty men that was laid before me. Having no familiarity with the first five films in the series I was going in blind, but I figured the intricacies of plot and character arcs from the previous films were not going to put me at too severe a disadvantage for an “enjoyable” viewing. What I got was certainly unexpected as Day of Reckoning plays more like an indie-thriller with a dash of torture-porn than it does an action film of the conventional sense, but such hair-splitting, genre-dividing pedantry isn’t my usual modus operandi.
It is a film that is hell-bent on punishing the viewer as often as possible…
Day of Reckoning kicks things off with a first person POV sequence that acts as a primer for the incessant gut-punches that follow. It pulls as few punches as possible as it establishes the righteous anger of the protagonist and suggests promises of ass-beatings to come. It is a film that is hell-bent on punishing the viewer as often as possible, making it an exhausting experience of borrowed ideas and bone-crunching exchanges of blows whenever one large brute encounters another on screen.
The film lives under the false pretense that a dozen stolen ideas are just as good as one original idea as it sets out on its befuddling Apocalypse Now meets every-nineties-thriller (particularly Memento), meets Enter the Void trek through neon slums and shit-covered walls that add superficial texture to every frame. Style over substance is perfectly fine, but strobing Gaspar Noe white-out cross-cuts to Jean-Claude-Van Colonel-Kurtz are best served in small doses. Some plotty stuff happens between punch exchanges and eventually Robocop finds his way to Colonel Kurtz and fulfills his destiny to become some sort of reverse Leonard Shelby, but who’s got time for all that when Dolph Lundgren is starting some sort of cult fueled by man-sweat and one-line clichés?
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is a bit of a scattershot mess, but a mess that manages to entertain. It borrows its clichés and cues from the most obvious sources possible, but does it with such upfront transparency that it practically cites its references while making them. It’s an equal mix of eye rolls and eye-gouges, bordering on silly in the lengthy exposition sequences between fights. Is this a meta-contextual silliness that show filmmakers having a blast with pedestrian material, or is it an earnest effort that legitimately believes it has something new to offer? I’m not really sure and such things are irrelevant during the actual viewing of a film, but one thing is certain; this is a film that has to be seen to be believed.
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