Well, if nothing else John Hyams follow-up to
his Universal Soldier: Regeneration film from a few years back
was different. Very different. 'Universal Soldier:
Day of Reckoning' is Wildly different from what I'm thinking
one would expect from a Universal Soldier movie starring Van
Damme, Dolph and Scott Adkins. This isn't necessarily a
good thing or bad thing, but it is something, that's for sure.
John (Adkins) is minding his own business sleeping with his
hot wife when his little girl stumbles in the bedroom creaking
out 'There's monsters in the house, daddy'. Get used to
hearing that little girl say that a lot in the movie. So
John goes to check it out and eventually he finds the monsters
in black masks who proceed to beat him near to death but make
sure he's conscious enough to witness his wife and baby girl
take bullets to the head. The odd thing is that the
leader of this group takes off his mask, revealing himself to
be Luc Deveraux (Van Damme) so John could see him, but still
allowed John to live. Peculiar.
Eventually John wakes up after an extended coma and proceeds
to go about the business of finding this man who murdered his
family. Now this is the point where 'Reckoning' gets
really strange, at least as far as me following along with the
narrative. On one side of town we have John, trying to
piece his life back together, but there seem to be large
chunks of John's life that his brutal beating has erased from
his memory. For instance recognition of the hot stripper
Sarah (Mariah Bonner) that he apparently used to kick it with
is completely lost on him. And he only ran into the hot
stripper after some distraught guy called him desperate for
help, this guy swearing John knew him, even though John could
not give this guy the help he needed.
But on the other side of town we have a team
of Universal Soldiers, including the completely out of his
mind Andrew Scott (Lundgren) who have somehow freed themselves
from the psychological control constraints of their handlers
and are now free thinking entities who now pay homage to their
leader and Messiah Luc Deveraux. Luc Deveraux the
Messiah just doesn't sound like a good thing to me for some
reason. What's bad for John is that it looks like
Messiah Devereaux wants him dead for some reason, and as such
he has dispatched super tough unisol Magnus (Andrei Arlovski)
to handle this light weight. Sure, we thought Magnus had
died in the last movie, and Deveraux could've killed John a
long time ago while he was killing his family, but all will be
revealed soon enough.
With the stripper by his side and Magnus on his ass, John will
get the answers he seeks. I don't think he's going to
like these answers too much, but he will get them and it will
be a bloody mess.
Categorizing Mr. Hyams 'Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning'
isn't as cut and dry as it seems. Yes, it is an action
movie with all the action trimming that one would expect from
a movie starring Scott Adkins, and make no mistake about it,
despite the presence of both Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph
Lundgren, both of whom barely put in enough time in this film
to qualify for cameo status, Scott Adkins is our star.
There are car chases and gratuitous nudity and fist
fights and shoot outs and enough bullets to the head for three
movies. So while this is an action film, it's also very
esoteric in its presentation, almost horror-movie like in the
pacing and coloring, and not to mention the occasional jump
scare, something we couldn't say about the previous film which
while plenty entertaining was also plenty stupid.
Reckoning aspires to be more than just a simple, mindless,
balls to the wall action film and we freely admit that we
admire John Hyams for taking the chance on making this
happen.
That being said, the question remains 'did we enjoy 'Universal
Soldier: Day of Reckoning'? Well… not as much as I
would've liked to have enjoyed it. While the action is
superior, just as it was in the last movie, the narrative was
so vague and murky that I, personally, never got completely
integrated into the story. Starting out, the pace was
lethargic, and the confusing narrative didn't give this
audience member much of a hint as to where in the hell it was
going, which I think would've made the murky story a little
more interesting. No worries as everything that was
going on in the life of John will become pretty clear, more or
less, but getting to that point at times was a bit of chore.
Now by the time we near the conclusion things start to clear
up, the story murky story obviously becomes much clearer and
things that we have seen begin to make sense and thus you may
be of the mind that the destination was worth the
journey. Me, not so much.
Still, Scott Adkins is always a joy to see in action, Dolph
and Jean Claude's stay in this movie, while brief, was
enjoyable and the action as per usual was top notch. I
imagine if there is a follow up after this movie, all of the
legwork has been taken care of in this edition and the
subsequent film will be more coherent and concise now that the
change in direction for the Universal Soldier is
complete. Of course we will be looking forward to that
movie should it come to fruition, no matter what we might've
just said here.
