“I wouldn’t exactly kill someone for a cigarette. I’d hurt them real bad at this point, but I won’t kill ’em.”

Josh’s review: The movie that launched a thousand movies… or just five more. I’m not even sure that analogy works. Either way, this is the first of a series of science fiction movies about a government project to produce super soldiers from the corpses of fallen military service men. You can probably guess what comes next. The project goes sideways and people get hurt and die.

One of the test subjects in this UniSol project is Luc Deveraux, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, an army soldier who dies in Vietnam when Dolph Lundgren’s Sergeant Adam Scott suffers a traumatic mental break and mows down an entire village. The squad try to stop him but are systematically dispatched, including Deveraux who takes down the crazed sergeant in the process. Twenty-five years and lot of ice later, this squad has been genetically altered into an elite squad of mercenaries run by someone in the government(?). Who really knows, it is a little loosey-goosey.

At some point, some math must have not been mathing, because Luc and Sergeant Scott both start to remember their past lives and begin reverting to the state of mind they were in when they died. This triggers a game of cat and mouse lit by explosions and littered with spent bullet casings.

First things first, this movie was directed by Roland Emmerich, a man who is no stranger to an explosion. I’d have to go and check but I am pretty sure he has destroyed the White House more than once. Considering the 10-year run he is about to go on between 1994’s Stargate and 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, this movie is pretty tame. There are plenty of explosions, but they are all practical, which I prefer.

However, I think there was a lot of missed opportunity to have limbs come off or major bodily damage. Universal Soldier already has an R rating, so why not go full carnage? These are super soldiers we’re talking about people! That would have provided something a little more visually interesting than shoot, kick, evade, repeat.

Speaking of visually interesting, the acting in this movie is just terrible. There is no chemistry between Luc and reporter Veronica Roberts (Ally Walker). The scenes where an attempt is made at humor with Luc not remembering how to eat or him getting naked just fall flat, not that Van Damme is a particularly emotive actor in the first place.

The same goes for Veronica, who is supposed to be a scrappy, street-wise reporter who always gets the story. Her one-liners disappear into silence and her “cool” hat and smoking habit do nothing to make me believe she could get a scoop on anything. The filmmakers attempted to give her character by literally making her read her character description on screen: “I don’t play by the rules but I always get results.” Sure. She spends the movie getting tossed around and dragged from one place to another. It would have been a much better dynamic if they had Veronica dragging Luc along, using her street smarts and contacts, keeping him from dying until she can break the story.

Dolph Lundgren tries his best here to act deranged, though I feel he suffers the same malady as Van Damme to a lesser degree. His motivation for doing all of this is a little weak considering he could do so much more with the technology and personnel at his disposal. Why go after this one insignificant soldier? I do like that he has an unhealthy obsession with puns. “Do you hear me?”

Another area I find lacking is in fight choreography. Clint Cadinha, the stunt choreographer, went on to do other uninspired beat-’em-ups like Demolition Man and Under Siege 2. The characters stand still and wait for their opponent to kick, punch, or choke them. There is nothing here any more creative than a roundhouse kick which is a shame because you have two highly skilled athletes at the peak of their careers.

Watching this movie as an adult is a wildly different experience from watching it as a kid. I remember loving this movie back then, and it’s one of the movies that got me into action films and to follow Van Damme’s career. I thought the idea of super soldiers was one of the coolest things ever. Of course, I hadn’t seen Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, or Robocop (all of which came before Universal Soldier), which are all better movies. As an adult, I had a hard time not falling asleep while watching this. Insider info: I didn’t succeed. There are way better sci-fi movies, action movies, JCVD movies, Lundgren movies, and Emmerich movies out there to watch. My suggestion is to go watch one of those.

“Goodnight A**hole”

Josh’s Sega Genesis game review: We were not a Super Nintendo family, we were a Sega Genesis family despite having an NES and every other Nintendo system that followed. One of the most frequently played games for my brother and I was Universal Soldier. If I’m not mistaken, I had and played this game prior to ever seeing the movie.

Universal Soldier is a fun side-scrolling action game where you essentially blast your way through robot and soldiers with various weaponry and power-ups. For some reason, you could Metroid your way into a ball that laid bombs. I don’t remember that part in the movie, but it would have been fun to see.

The music is just as good as you would expect from a Sega game, very lively and memorable. I wish I had the soundtrack. Something tells me there won’t ever be a live orchestra touring the music from Universal Soldier any time soon.

I can still remember the notebook I had with all my passwords written down. The game, like most games back then, didn’t allow for save files, so you would be given a password after completing a level. The next time you went back to the game after your mom yelled at you for not going to bed when you were supposed to and she caught you trying to leave the system on all night with the game paused, you’d still have a way to go back to where you left off.

It wasn’t until years later that I found out Universal Soldier was just a clone of another another game, Turrican II. Everything is essentially the same except for a few tweaks like different sprites and a couple added maps. Kind of fitting considering where the film franchise went.

Justin’s rating: “Jean-Claude, are you able to look puzzled and blink your eyes a lot while staring at nothing in particular? Then have we got a movie role for you!”

Justin’s review: A little while back, I found out that Josh was a mega-fan of the Universal Soldier franchise and had capital-O Opinions on them. A short conversation about this resulted in the two of us banding together to do one of those crazy marathons that sounds good in theory but takes a significant portion of our stable psyche away in practice. Nevertheless, we agreed: We’d watch and review all six Universal Soldier flicks, starting with the plucky 1992 Roland Emmerich original.

When this film came out, very few people outside of Germany — or even inside of it — had heard of this cult scifi director. Emmerich spent the ’80s cranking out some really weird stuff like Ghost Chase, Moon 44, and Making Contact, but was right on the cusp of breaking into Hollywood by the time the ’90s rolled around. Universal Soldier became the stepping stone between his old career and Stargate, at which point we opened Pandora’s Box and lent so much money to this weird dude to make overblown spectacles.

Two US soldiers — Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Scott (Dolph Lundgren) — come to blows in Vietnam when Scott goes insane and starts making ear necklaces. Both kill each other, but the military isn’t done with them yet. Their bodies are cryogenically frozen and, 25 years later, are resurrected as part of the Universal Soldier project to make invincible perfect super-soldiers. The only drawback is that these lunkheads (along with some other muscley lunkheads) are effectively skilled zombies without much in the way of memories or personalities.

So yeah, Emmerich was sampling without any shame from RoboCop and The Terminator as so many before him had. But using human actors is a lot cheaper than high-tech cyborgs when all you have to do is give them some funky eyepieces and pretend that they’re practically invincible, save for a tendency to overheat.

The “UniSols” are meant for good, to do the tough missions that are near-impossible for regular soldiers. Early on, the crew rescue a bunch of hostages from terrorists holding a dam in a nicely thrilling experience. Say what you will about him, but Emmerich can pull out good action sequence when he wants to.

But whatever brainwashing was given to these guys didn’t fully take, because both Deveraux and Scott gradually awaken to their full personalities — and since they don’t like each other so much, the fight is on. Deveraux goes rogue with a reporter (Ally Walker), while the rest of the UniSols (including Scott) track him down.

It’s not that complicated of a movie, just a framework for two B-movie action stars with extremely limited emotional ranges to strut their stuff and duke it out. But it’s a slick framework, a solid enough action flick that it made a good return at the box office and kickstarted the aforementioned franchise.

Other than being a vehicle for JCVD to continually get naked, Universal Soldier is a nicely violent road trip where RoboTerminators from the past get a new lease on life. It’s cheesy and on the lower end of the budget scale, but it obviously hit a chord with early ’90s viewers who ate up this along with stuff like Surviving the Game and Gunmen. It’s a fine enough watch as long as you keep your expectations set at “monotone delivery, maximum carnage.”

Shalen’s rating: Four out of eight cyborg zombie Vietnam veterans.

Shalen’s review: This movie has everything one could come to expect from an adulthood of watching both Jean Claude Van Damme movies and Mechanical Man movies.* It has over-muscled men with or without foreign accents starting out in full uniforms, then finding ways to get mostly out of them while not actually participating in any sex scenes. It has grotesque injuries that are either ignored or healed miraculously. It has numerous unnecessary and graphic on-screen deaths, or in this particular case, mostly off-screen deaths. It has that obsessive commanding officer who does things like shooting his own men to indicate how serious he is.

It has Jean Claude’s famous 740-degree-or-so round kick and the muscular naked buttocks that we are sure actually belongs to him, because where would they find a body double that short?

Here’s the plot, such as it is: Van Damme is Luc Deveraux, a soldier in Vietnam whose commanding officer Andrew Scott (played by Dolph Lundgren! Yay!) goes bughouse and starts making jewelry out of human body parts. Luc objects to this fashion gaffe, so they shoot each other to death. Then some army higher-ups come along and collect the bodies.

Cut to the “near future,” which looks a lot like 1992, when these two and others have been brought back from the dead. Now they are an antiterrorist unit which goes around carrying bad first-person-shooter style cameras that harm their depth perception, but this does not matter, because they are dead. We are reminded of this by the fact that they get to sit around naked in a very cold room in between terrorist-fighting gigs. Being really cold allows reanimated dead guys to regenerate faster, because… er… Look! More pectorals!

A plucky blond reporter (who, I regret to inform you, survives the film) shows up to film them, gets fired, and goes snooping around with her disposable camera person. The army folks’ attempt to hush her up kicks off some flashbacks Luc has been having vis-a-vis how he died, and he helps her escape. They spend the rest of the movie alternating fighting and fleeing.

At some point Scott the Lundgren starts remembering that he is crazy, kills a bunch of folks, and kills some others as he goes off pursuing Luc. They have a big traditional fight scene in which Scott starts by wiping the floor with Luc, then gets inexplicably killed when the main character cheats. Luc gets the girl and also to see his parents, who live in Lousiana and somehow have very different accents from his. Not that Van Damme sounds much like a Cajun anyway.**

One does not go into a film like this one looking for directorial innovation, or unusual camera work, or stellar scripts and acting. One goes into it hoping to see Jean Claude Van Damme beat people up and get beat up himself. This happens, so it’s a fairly satisfying movie in that regard.

It’s too bad the filmmakers apparently watched the second Indiana Jones movie and thought Willie Scott was a great character, because they more or less inserted her into this one as the plucky blond reporter. She does get to feel up naked Van Damme to look for a tracking device, which is more than Willie ever got in return for her energy expenditure in the form of shrieking. At least this one seems to have cigarette voice from all the smoking, so she’s a little less shrill. See, back in the early ’90s they thought smoking was a good way for women to indicate their independence in between squealing and tripping on things.***

I was a little disappointed in the Mechanical Man aspects of the film, which are only present for about the first half. After that Luc pretty much goes back to acting anxious and surprised, Scott goes back to being crazy, and all the other Unisols (as the army folks call them, as if they were some kind of ill-advised parasol/unicycle hybrid designed by the Pentagon) are dead.

There’s no attempt at really explaining what it’s like to be one of the Unisols, or what it feels like to undergo the kind of changes Luc goes through over the course of the film. This is more or less an area where no thought was expended whatsoever. Even Solo does better with that aspect of this action subgenre, and that was definitely a B-movie sort of film.

En fin, this is a dumb movie. It’s a silly movie. And, if you like watching this sort of thing, it can be a lot of fun. Not recommended for the sensitive sort of folks who feel they can better relate to art films and dramas, but if you’re into popcorn actioners, this is not a bad way to spend an evening with some like-minded people.

*See reviews of Soldier, Terminator 2, and Solo for more on the Mechanical Man archetype and why Shalen loves it. (Because she is a sick, sick person in need of therapy, that’s why.)

**We understand he is actually Belgian.

***It was actually a plot to give all the radical feminists lung cancer, but then the whole goddess thing became popular and many of them switched to herbs and crystals. This is far more obnoxious than smoking, but it doesn’t usually kill you.

Intermission!

• Ear necklace, eww
• Transforming truck gets its own big moment
• “They’re eight seconds behind schedule.” picky much?
• That was the shortest car chase scene of all time
• Car cigarette lighters can fix a bullet wound, no problem
• Van Damme movie moments: Gratuitous butt shot
• UniSols can quickly heal from bullet wounds
• “What accent?” haha
• Surprisingly, a handful of papers does very little damage when swatted at a UniSol
• “He can’t hear you.” [slaps down a pair of ears on the table]
• “I’m all ears!”
• This movie is brought to you by Pepsi
• He just wanted to eat his dinner in peace, guys. C’mon.
• What supermarket has a freezer with giant hanging slabs of frozen cows?
• That’s a LOT of cops
• Luc’s parents’ farm is supposedly in Louisiana, but at the end you can see mountains in the background (Louisiana doesn’t have any).
• Dolph Lundgren’s acting. It’s hard to believe this man also starred in The Punisher and Masters of the Universe, isn’t it?
• I’m thinking that reporter gets so peevish as the film goes on because Luc took away her cigarettes. Cold turkey while running for your life. Ouch.
• Cult movie bonus points: Tiny Lister as a background Unisol.
• The young couple that Luc reacts to at the Hoover Dam incident are actually the same actors in the beginning in Vietnam
• Those eyepieces. Anybody else thinking “Resistance is futile?”
• With what outfit would an ear necklace go best?
• This truck looks like the beefiest Transformer.
• This movie is just a lot ducking while people shoot way too high.
• Buns count: 1 scene