The Existential Horror of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

Rating: 😰

In 1992, megacinema auteur Roland Emmerich cranked out Universal Soldier, a sci-fi run-n-gun about a special ops team of reanimated Vietnam jarheads known as “UniSols.” Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren at the height of their schlockitude, the film mostly employs the premise of living dead beefboys to have cool setpieces where every nigh-unkillable character acts like RoboCop and/or the Terminator. Sure there's some stuff in there about PTSD and forever war, and Lundgren snags some genuinely frightening villain moments, but it's all a bit obscured by copious shots of naked Van Damme and some tepid fish-out-of-water comedy. On the whole though? Not bad! Enjoyable even! You could do worse if you're looking for a kinda goofy, kinda freaky, mostly efficient ‘90s action Blockbuster rental.

Over the next seven years, Universal Soldier snagged two sequels and a quasi-reboot, released in 1998, 1998, and, uh, 1999 respectively. Huh. To be honest I have no interest in these films and did not watch them, even though one boasts the hilarious subtitle “UNFINISHED BUSINESS.” The lead role of supersoldier Luc Devereux gets passed off to a guy who’s only known for replacing JCVD in these movies, but apparently was a linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles? I don't know dude, the more I read about these the more I think I might have to watch them. Anyway, Big J comes back for Universal Soldier: The Return in ‘99 and fights Michael Jai White and then the UniSol program goes dark - seemingly for good, but probably for the best.

Then, a decade later, some miracle occurs. Through whatever unholy sequence of wheeling and dealing, the Universal Soldier franchise finds itself in the hands of director and apparent madman John Hyams, who at that point was mostly known for a mixed martial arts documentary called The Smashing Machine. Ready to pump blood into a long-cold corpse, Hyams revitalizes the UniSols with two direct-to-video rebootquels: 2009’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration and 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. His efforts were not in vain. The franchise lived again, more powerful than ever before. But like the malfunctioning hollow men who populate them, something is wrong with Hyam’s offerings; something deeply perturbing and uncanny. The humor is gone, the personality is gone; any semblance of what this franchise might have been before is completely stripped away. All that remains are two of the most off-putting and existentially terrifying films ever quietly released on home video. They are brutal, dehumanizing, and strip traditional action film masculinity down to the fucking bone. Yes, really.

The second 2009’s Regeneration begins, you can tell it's gonna make Emmerich’s outing look like some real Boy Scout bullshit. Opening with a stunning car chase that piles on the broken glass and dead meat, Regeneration blasts out into a political action thriller which finds radical separatists facing off against the Ukraine government. The terrorists have kidnapped the Prime Minister’s children and are holding them hostage at nowhere less than Chernobyl, with their own UniSol acting as lethal guardian and secret weapon. When the US government intervenes only to have their forces slaughtered by this wrist-bladed butcher, a decommissioned and rehabilitated Luc Devereux is forced back into action. Can Jean-Claude stop the terrorists before they blow the lid off Chernobyl? The better question is: do we even want to see him try?

When we pick up with Devereux, he's living a quiet life somewhere in a snowy town. Long since removed from the UniSol program, Luc has made progress towards being less of a programmed killing machine and more of an operational human being - but he still struggles with memory functions, still feels emotionally distant, still carries the conditioning and trauma which leads him to nearly kill with his bare hands when provoked. This postscript existence is representative of Hyams’ concern with the franchise - namely, the implicit horror of a premise which revives men after their expiration date to reintegrate into patterns of violence. In less capable hands such a direction might not stick, or prove detrimentally grim, but Hyams pokes and prods and blows up the underlying trauma of Universal Soldier in a way that integrates seamlessly and sickeningly with Regeneration’s duties as an action film.

When Luc goes back into duty, it's not the triumphant return of Arnie in a Terminator sequel or even the “this is unfortunate but I know he's gonna kick ass” of John Wick. It's a painful, roboticizing process which strips Devereux of his memories and mind and tunnels him back into the role of military dog and killing machine. Regeneration’s visual style echoes this dehumanization tremendously - all images of steel and machinery and snow and derelict spaces; all shot and colored with a blue-hued frigidity that would make Cronenberg shiver. The action sequences only serve to exacerbate such coldness, showcasing an MMA-inspired fighting style designed to end encounters as quickly and brutally as possible with debilitation or death. These battles are shockingly violent, consistently impressive, and never fun. All Hyams’ stylistic choices compound exponentially into hair-trigger tension, and by the time Dolph Lundgren finally makes his appearance you’re less excited to see the Blonde Beast, and more instantly mortified by the idea of whatever havoc this malfunctioning monster could wreak.

For anyone who watches Emmerich’s Universal Soldier and thinks “hey, isn't this concept kind of inherently terrifying,” John Hyams hears you and delivers what you want in the literal first twenty minutes of Regeneration. Then, he keeps on delivering and delivering and delivering until the film is just nothing but bloodstains and empty meat husks and an ending that made me mutter “oh, fuck that” out loud. Sure, the movie is a bit loose at times in its editing, framing, and performances, but the narrative is efficient and the end result is an action-horror banger which tends towards icky, flesh-prison dread that reminds you how fragile the human mind and body can really be. If you read between the lines I'm sure there's something to Regeneration about how action franchises force their stars into performing loops of repetitive aggression - but that kind of thing is for smart people, and I've got a whole other movie to talk about.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration left me pretty unsettled. The 2012 follow-up Day of Reckoning left me utterly shell-shocked. Apparently unsatisfied with wrenching Universal Soldier’s concept completely inside-out, John Hyams returned to drive his ideas on identity and violence and masculinity to their ultimate endpoint. The resulting concoction is the most bizarre, experimental, and nihilistic firebomb ever unleashed as a direct-to-video sequel in a mid-tier action franchise. Though I struggle to properly quantify it, I'll tell you this much: Day of Reckoning is a harrowing film, and despite my initial criticisms I've been obsessing over it for the last twenty-four hours. It's an experience of tremendous and unexpected power, or at least is just thoroughly strange enough to leave an impression. Staunchly committed to denying the pleasures of a traditional “action” film, Reckoning comes on strong like a bad-vibe paranoid freakout sequence stretched to feature length - in other words, a long way from comedy shots of JCVD’s nude ass.

The narrative kicks off like any other vengeance film made in the last decade: after his wife and child are killed in a savage home invasion, amnesiac John wakes up from a coma and seeks retaliation on the man who murdered them. He sets out on this quest with only a face and a name: Luc Devereux. As John gets closer to the Van Damme behind the slaughter, things get looser and more surreal. An enigma emerges, identities and motives are questioned, a terrorist UniSol army makes an appearance, and there's an absolutely barbaric fight in a sporting goods store. Aside from the presence of Jean and Dolph, the experience is completely alien to the first Universal Soldier, and even to Regeneration. For the sake of the film I won't say much more, only that it goes places I didn't think this franchise would tread in a million years. My description might lead you to conceptualize Day of Reckoning as an action-revenge movie with mystery elements. It is not. To put it bluntly, Day of Reckoning is Lost Highway with skull-liquefying MMA beatdowns.

It's difficult if not impossible for me to overstate the consistency and grotesqueness of this film’s violence. From the first gunshot to the last, every pinpoint of brutality is abrupt and unempathetic; completely without fanfare. There's a sequence early on where a brain-freaked UniSol goes on a shotgun spree through a neon-soaked brothel, which in a worse movie might be a Hotline Miami-type synthwave shoot-’em-up. Here it's as empty as the man behind the trigger. The soundtrack is nothing but a repetitive electronic beat, the bodies simply jerk and crumple and die, the camera never sees fit to pull away for a single second. Like most of the movie, it's exhausting and miserable. This is the logical conclusion to the Universal Soldier franchise: aimless carnage inflicted by unstoppable yet vacant men, either slaves to their conditioning or to their basic instincts, but ultimately slabs of meats used for violent ends by violent people. It's too much at times, but so is Day of Reckoning’s entirety. By the time it all ends, all the decapitations and blood and strobe lights and sweat, you kind of just have to stare at the wall. Like the UniSols, you've been dehumanized.

I still have reservations about the pacing on this thing, about the loose framing and editing which carries over from Regeneration, about the lack of that prior film's efficient structure, about the central mystery which deals wholly in uninteresting dialogue and tediously brooding shots of lead actor Scott Adkins, about the blatant narrative derivations of Apocalypse Now......but to focus on these complaints is to ignore the absolute triumph of conceptualizing something this vicious and unsettling, much less getting it released as a direct-to-video franchise sequel. Is Day of Reckoning a secret masterpiece? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that, like an evil thematic twin of Resident Evil: Retribution (released the same year!), it's one of the strongest and most horrifying takes on identity and the terror of being flesh I've seen in a while. It's one thing to talk about cycles of violence and the way they bestialize, but it's another to make you feel it, and Day of Reckoning’s cumulative effect is that of being hit by a sledgehammer. Did I enjoy it? Not really. Was the film a success? Absolutely.

To say that John Hyams injected fear into Universal Soldier is like saying David Lynch makes some odd movies. While ostensibly accurate, it doesn't capture the sheer depth or impact of the experience. Perhaps they won't play the same for everyone, but I ended both watches with a pervasive sense I’d just seen something that shouldn't be allowed. Taken together, Regeneration and Day of Reckoning are a juggernaut duology of existential fright, and I have nothing but respect for films which do what these do from the springboard of a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle. I hear they’re working on rebooting the franchise again, but I doubt we’re ever going to get something as wild as what these two movies lay down. If you’re in the mood for action-horror, they get my highest recommendation. Watch them alone and space out afterwards, or call some friends over for one of the most miserable and awkward movie nights you’re likely to have. Either way, in Day of Reckoning’s words: you’re fucked.