Diving into four of the Universal Soldier sequels.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER III: UNFINISHED BUSINESS (1998)
Two made-for-TV (specifically, they were made for The Movie Channel) sequels to the 1992 film Universal Soldier were made back-to-back, so of course when Universal Soldier II: Brothers in Arms came to an end there was still some unfinished business left for mind-wiped, resurrected solder Luc Devreaux (Matt Battaglia) and his reporter love interest Veronica Roberts (Chandra West) to deal with in part 3. Namely, Burt Reynolds' shady character Mentor was still out there, smoking cigars while delivering his lines in a poor attempt at an Irish accent and remaining determined to keep the Universal Soldier program running despite the government's orders to shut it down.
If you missed the previous Universal Soldier movies, the UniSol program gathered the bodies of dead soldiers and resurrected them as genetically enhanced super soldiers that followed orders like brainwashed zombies and were nearly indestructible. When Veronica found out about the program, Luc went A.W.O.L. from it to protect her from his fellow UniSols and the people behind the program framed Veronica for murder. Now they're on the run together, trying to find a way to clear Veronica's name and bring an end to UniSol for good.
While Luc and Veronica are off on their mission, getting caught up in a random hostage situation before meeting with a character who was played by Jerry Orbach in the '92 movie but is now played by Jack Duffy (and has had his memory wiped), Mentor is plotting some side schemes. One involves the theft of $10 billion in gold bullion that Swiss authorities have gathered to pay holocaust survivors, and the other involves a new type of Universal Soldier. Instead of killing people and re-animating them, UniSol is getting into cloning, growing a brand new soldier at an accelerated rate. Of course, the identity of this clone is going to be troubling for Luc.
Directed by Jeff Woolnough from a script by Peter M. Lenkov, the same team behind the previous film, Unfinished Business is a step up from Brothers in Arms because there's more going on in it. Even if the Die Hard-inspired hostage situation comes out of nowhere, at least it provides some action. Later there's a standout sequence set in nursing home, during which we meet an entertaining character played by Philip Williams, who would go on to appear in the Friday the 13th sequel Jason X.
Williams' character is a patient named Scully, and when he sees a nurse who happens to be a UniSol sleeper agent pull a gun on Luc and Veronica, his reaction is, "Damn, brother. You gone postal?" This moment with Scully was my favorite part of either of these Movie Channel sequels.
Brothers in Arms had a lot of dead air in it and got bogged down in bad decisions, but Unfinished Business moves along at a decent pace. I don't think this could have served as a solid foundation for a series, like The Movie Channel was hoping it would at one point, but it's a watchable low budget action flick. While the film wraps up some storylines by the end, it does end with a cliffhanger that could have led into the series - a cliffhanger that even brings the then-POTUS into the mix. I wouldn't have wanted to see the follow-up to this cliffhanger anyway, so I don't mind that the Universal Soldier franchise moved on without acknowledging the events of these movies.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN (1999)
Just one year after The Movie Channel unsuccessfully tried to start a Universal Soldier television series with the production of two sequels to the 1992 film Universal Soldier, those TV movies were disregarded and pushed out of continuity by the theatrical release Universal Soldier: The Return. This one was something special, because it marked the first time Jean-Claude Van Damme ever came back to star in a sequel to one of his films. Although I had drifted away from my Van Damme fandom for a few years prior to this, I was hyped for The Return because I loved the first Universal Soldier and was excited to see Van Damme continue the story of Luc Deveraux.
I was there to see Universal Soldier: The Return on its opening weekend, and it was going to be the first movie I ever saw in the theatre on my own, but that plan was shot down because the movie was rated R and I was 15. A theatre employee wouldn't let me into the movie, so my mom and her boyfriend, who had intended to just drop me off at theatre, had to stick around and watch the movie with me. I didn't mind having the company, because I still remember seeing the first Universal Soldier in the theatre with my mom and father seven years earlier. I didn't see the first movie alone, so it was fitting that I didn't see the second alone.
Directed by Mic Rodgers from a screenplay by William Malone and John Fasano, The Return does fall short of the quality of the first film. With a low budget look to it and a running time of 83 minutes, it feels like something that should have gone direct-to-video, as future Universal Soldier sequels would.
Several years down the line from the events of the first movie, Luc is working with the Universal Soldier program he went A.W.O.L. from, which doesn't seem like something the character would have done. UniSol resurrected him after he was killed in the Vietnam War and messed with his head to turn him into an emotionless war machine, but now he's just a regular guy who is helping train the new generation of soldiers. Luc explains that he'd rather have undead killing machines in the field than mortal recruits.
The UniSols are now allowed to show more personality than previous ones were. For example, you have wrestler Bill Goldberg as a UniSol named Romeo, who is always dropping one-liners and even seems to be planning to rape Luc's fellow instructor Maggie (Kiana Tom). Romeo is largely played for laughs, and this over-the-top, wannabe-comedic creeper character just doesn't work. It's annoying and cringe-inducing. The Return has a goofy sensibility in general, as evident from the fact that the UniSol program has its own tagline: "Dying to Serve".
New and improved UniSols have a chip in their brains that allows their actions to be monitored and controlled by an artificial intelligence system called Self-Evolving Thought Helix. So where was S.E.T.H. when Romero was ripping Maggie's top off? S.E.T.H. doesn't deal with inappropriate actions like that, but when government higher-ups decide to shut down the UniSol program due to budget cuts, S.E.T.H. definitely responds to that. Just 17 minutes into the movie, S.E.T.H. is taking unauthorized control of UniSols and getting them ready to battle anyone who tries to shut them down.
S.E.T.H. gets some outside help from a hacker called Squid, another character who adds some painful "comic relief" into the mix. He's a tech genius who's presented like a moron, acts and dresses like he's supposed to be 20-something but actor Brent Hinkley was pushing 40. Stuffing his face with Frankenberry cereal that has cola on it instead of milk, laughing at the sight of UniSols massacring people on live TV, Squid is cringe personified.
S.E.T.H. and the UniSols take control of the UniSol headquarters, and someone involved with the making of this movie might have thought "Die Hard with UniSols" was a great idea, but the movie seems so low rent that the choice to have most of the story take place in or around this one location seems like a budgetary decision. And it's another thing that makes this movie feel like it should have been a DTV release.
Luc is inside the building when the UniSols take it over, of course, as is Maggie - and Luc's tween daughter Hillary (Karis Paige Bryant). Luc was married between movies, presumably to the Veronica Roberts character he met in the '92 film, but his wife passed away. Raising his daughter alone forces Luc to take Hillary to work at UniSol H.Q. with him, which puts her in great danger when S.E.T.H. goes rogue. Veronica isn't around, but she gets replaced by a character who is a lot like she was, reporter Erin Young (Heidi Schanz).
Van Damme gets to take part in plenty of action sequences as the film goes on, though they're often undermined by the decision to blast late '90s metal on the soundtrack, and he has too many run-ins with the unstoppable Romeo. He eventually has to destroy S.E.T.H., and there wouldn't be much fun in watching Van Damme bust up a computer system, so S.E.T.H. downloads itself into the body of a UniSol super soldier. The A.I.'s choice of body gives us one of the few cool things about this movie: the Luc vs. S.E.T.H. battle is between Van Damme and Michael Jai White.
Twenty years later, Universal Soldier: The Return remains the only directorial credit for stuntman Mic Rodgers, and it's easy to understand why. The Return is packed with bad decisions and was a box office failure, so there wasn't much reason for him to be in demand after this. He does continue to do stunts to this day, so that part of his career is still going strong.
The Return is a campy, cheeseball mess that is a major step down from its predecessor... but if you like your action movies campy and cheeseball, it does provide 83 minutes of mindless entertainment. I can't say I dislike the movie, even though I don't think it's good.
Just one year after The Movie Channel unsuccessfully tried to start a Universal Soldier television series with the production of two sequels to the 1992 film Universal Soldier, those TV movies were disregarded and pushed out of continuity by the theatrical release Universal Soldier: The Return. This one was something special, because it marked the first time Jean-Claude Van Damme ever came back to star in a sequel to one of his films. Although I had drifted away from my Van Damme fandom for a few years prior to this, I was hyped for The Return because I loved the first Universal Soldier and was excited to see Van Damme continue the story of Luc Deveraux.
I was there to see Universal Soldier: The Return on its opening weekend, and it was going to be the first movie I ever saw in the theatre on my own, but that plan was shot down because the movie was rated R and I was 15. A theatre employee wouldn't let me into the movie, so my mom and her boyfriend, who had intended to just drop me off at theatre, had to stick around and watch the movie with me. I didn't mind having the company, because I still remember seeing the first Universal Soldier in the theatre with my mom and father seven years earlier. I didn't see the first movie alone, so it was fitting that I didn't see the second alone.
Directed by Mic Rodgers from a screenplay by William Malone and John Fasano, The Return does fall short of the quality of the first film. With a low budget look to it and a running time of 83 minutes, it feels like something that should have gone direct-to-video, as future Universal Soldier sequels would.
Several years down the line from the events of the first movie, Luc is working with the Universal Soldier program he went A.W.O.L. from, which doesn't seem like something the character would have done. UniSol resurrected him after he was killed in the Vietnam War and messed with his head to turn him into an emotionless war machine, but now he's just a regular guy who is helping train the new generation of soldiers. Luc explains that he'd rather have undead killing machines in the field than mortal recruits.
The UniSols are now allowed to show more personality than previous ones were. For example, you have wrestler Bill Goldberg as a UniSol named Romeo, who is always dropping one-liners and even seems to be planning to rape Luc's fellow instructor Maggie (Kiana Tom). Romeo is largely played for laughs, and this over-the-top, wannabe-comedic creeper character just doesn't work. It's annoying and cringe-inducing. The Return has a goofy sensibility in general, as evident from the fact that the UniSol program has its own tagline: "Dying to Serve".
New and improved UniSols have a chip in their brains that allows their actions to be monitored and controlled by an artificial intelligence system called Self-Evolving Thought Helix. So where was S.E.T.H. when Romero was ripping Maggie's top off? S.E.T.H. doesn't deal with inappropriate actions like that, but when government higher-ups decide to shut down the UniSol program due to budget cuts, S.E.T.H. definitely responds to that. Just 17 minutes into the movie, S.E.T.H. is taking unauthorized control of UniSols and getting them ready to battle anyone who tries to shut them down.
S.E.T.H. gets some outside help from a hacker called Squid, another character who adds some painful "comic relief" into the mix. He's a tech genius who's presented like a moron, acts and dresses like he's supposed to be 20-something but actor Brent Hinkley was pushing 40. Stuffing his face with Frankenberry cereal that has cola on it instead of milk, laughing at the sight of UniSols massacring people on live TV, Squid is cringe personified.
S.E.T.H. and the UniSols take control of the UniSol headquarters, and someone involved with the making of this movie might have thought "Die Hard with UniSols" was a great idea, but the movie seems so low rent that the choice to have most of the story take place in or around this one location seems like a budgetary decision. And it's another thing that makes this movie feel like it should have been a DTV release.
Luc is inside the building when the UniSols take it over, of course, as is Maggie - and Luc's tween daughter Hillary (Karis Paige Bryant). Luc was married between movies, presumably to the Veronica Roberts character he met in the '92 film, but his wife passed away. Raising his daughter alone forces Luc to take Hillary to work at UniSol H.Q. with him, which puts her in great danger when S.E.T.H. goes rogue. Veronica isn't around, but she gets replaced by a character who is a lot like she was, reporter Erin Young (Heidi Schanz).
Van Damme gets to take part in plenty of action sequences as the film goes on, though they're often undermined by the decision to blast late '90s metal on the soundtrack, and he has too many run-ins with the unstoppable Romeo. He eventually has to destroy S.E.T.H., and there wouldn't be much fun in watching Van Damme bust up a computer system, so S.E.T.H. downloads itself into the body of a UniSol super soldier. The A.I.'s choice of body gives us one of the few cool things about this movie: the Luc vs. S.E.T.H. battle is between Van Damme and Michael Jai White.
Twenty years later, Universal Soldier: The Return remains the only directorial credit for stuntman Mic Rodgers, and it's easy to understand why. The Return is packed with bad decisions and was a box office failure, so there wasn't much reason for him to be in demand after this. He does continue to do stunts to this day, so that part of his career is still going strong.
The Return is a campy, cheeseball mess that is a major step down from its predecessor... but if you like your action movies campy and cheeseball, it does provide 83 minutes of mindless entertainment. I can't say I dislike the movie, even though I don't think it's good.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION (2009)
The Universal Soldier franchise really doesn't care about the concept of continuity. Eleven years after the 1992 film Universal Soldier got a pair of TV movie sequels that were then ignored by the following year's theatrical sequel Universal Soldier: The Return, we got the direct-to-video sequel Universal Soldier: Regeneration, which disregards the events of the TV movies and The Return.
The good news is that Jean-Claude Van Damme came back to reprise the role of Universal Soldier Luc Devereaux. More good news: director John Hyams (who brought his father, director Peter Hyams, on board as his cinematographer) packed the film with some very exciting action sequences that would make the film well worth watching whether it had Universal Soldier in the title or not. And it gets better. Dolph Lundgren is also in this film as a clone of the villain from the first movie.
Regeneration is the only screenwriting credit for Victor Ostrovsky, who crafted quite a simple story for this sequel. A group of terrorists in Ukraine have rigged the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with explosives that will be detonated, releasing a massive amount of radiation, in 72 hours if the Prime Minister doesn't release the political prisoners they're associated with. To give the PM even more incentive to do as they say, the terrorists also abduct the PM's two children and take them to Chernobyl.
The U.S. military and the Ukrainian Army move in on Chernobyl to wipe out the terrorists, assisted by four of the five remaining Universal Soldiers: those resurrected, mind-wiped soldiers we were introduced to in the previous films. The terrorists have their own Universal Soldier, though. A "Next Generation UniSol" (or NGU) who is not only an undead killing machine but has also been genetically enhanced to be even more badass the original UniSols. NGU, played by MMA fighter / former UFC Heavyweight Champion Andrei Arlovski, is able to wipe out the older generation UniSols without much trouble. (And he has a tendency to stab people with a blade that pops out of a device on his wrist, much like the alien villain in the Dolph Lundgren movie I Come in Peace.) So the military has to turn to the fifth and final OG UniSol. Luc Devereaux.
The Return told us that Luc became a regular guy who tried to have a normal life and even fathered a child, but that's not the case in Regeneration. Here he hasn't even been able to return to society yet, he's still undergoing hormonal and psychological therapy to try to put his UniSol days behind him. Just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. It's mentioned that Luc has only been in therapy for the last two years, so it's not clear where he was for the other fifteen years between the first movie and this one. The story doesn't cover that. It brings up questions, but this element of the film does make Luc a sympathetic figure. We feel bad for him, but at the same time we need the therapy to be reversed so we can watch Van Damme kick some ass.
And kick ass he does. Hyams makes us wait over an hour for it, but Luc's Chernobyl raid is a glorious sight to behold, and that's quickly followed by his confrontations with NGU and the clone of Sergeant Andrew Scott, who is an uncontrollable homicidal maniac like the person he's a clone of. The film ends with 20 minutes of pretty much non-stop, hard-hitting Van Damme action, which is appreciated.
Regeneration still isn't a Universal Soldier movie I like near as much as I like the original, but it's a step up from the films that came in between them. It's simple and quick, and the action is great.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (2012)
When Universal Soldier: Regeneration director John Hyams returned to helm another entry in the franchise, he decided to take a completely different approach to the material than had ever been taken before. The resulting film won over a lot of viewers with its mind-bending story of amnesia, artificial memories, and clones, a tone that leans it into horror, stylistic flourishes that bring to mind the works of Gaspar Noé (including a really irritating strobe effect that's used a couple times), and brutal action sequences. Others were put off by what Hyams did here. Myself included.
Scott Adkins, who would also go on to star in the sequel to the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Hard Target, stars as a man named John, whose family is murdered in a home invasion led by Van Damme's character Luc Deveraux, the hero of the previous films. The murder of his family is the only thing John remembers about his past, so he goes searching for answers - and ends up being relentlessly pursued by a hulking brute named Magnus (Andrei Arlovski), who was a Universal Soldier sleeper agent working as a plumber until he was activated. He also meets a stripper named Sarah (Mariah Bonner), who knew him before, and Sarah leads him to himself. Literally. She takes him to a cabin where a guy who looks just like him is living.
Sporting a shaved head and leading a group of UniSol soldiers who have been released from government control (including Dolph Lundgren as the latest clone of Andrew Scott), Deveraux is basically this film's version of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. John has to take a boat ride down a river to meet him, and when they do meet Deveraux seems like a spaced-out cult leader. He's not the villain that home invasion memory makes him appear to be, but he's not the Deveraux we knew before, either. Which is a bummer to me. I want to see Van Damme as the familiar Luc Deveraux in a Universal Soldier movie, not this weird twist on the character.
I don't like much Hyams and his co-writers Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenlagh did with the story here, the way it plays out isn't appealing to me. This isn't the sort of movie that I would enjoy even if it were an original, so it's even more off-putting to me that it was dropped into a franchise I had been following. I don't connect with John, so I don't care which of him is a clone or which isn't, or what his true memories are.
The action sequences are very cool, I will give the movie that. The fights are bloody and well shot, and the performers do an excellent job with the stunts and choreography. Those are worth seeing. I'm just not into the story wrapped around them.
Day of Reckoning feels more like an alternate reality "what if?" idea than a proper continuation of the story of Luc Deveraux. I think it's a shame things were taken in this direction and that Deveraux was given this sort of ending.
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