A carnival of technology

I had seen Universal Soldier before seeing this movie. I couldn’t remember if I had or not, but then I saw the ones in this movie and thought, “oh, right, that movie…yeah, I remember the first one.”

That didn’t make this one bearable. Van Damme isn’t even a bad actor. He’s not even an actor, really. It’d be like me trying to act. Also, he has that accent which makes him sound like a pussy.

My main question about this movie is how can Van Damme be in this one if he died in the first one? Didn’t the first one establish that the universal soldiers were dead soldiers that had been brought back to life with neon green medical gel and all they could do is kill (see, in the medical gel world, neon blue would mean they’d turn in to zombies…see Resident Evil for confirmation).

This movie clearly establishes Van Damme as not-a-unisol, but they make references to that being his old job. What? How can being dead be a former job?

I was very disappointed that the giant tank of acid wasn’t used for anything. They kept walking by it. Over and over. Very disappointing.

Also, like Shea, I question why we keep making movie plots around self-aware computers. James Cameron constructed a well-formed proof showing that self-aware computers are bad (Terminator/1984, Terminator 2/1991). Come up with a better idea.

I give this movie 3/10 because we didn’t take any breaks watching it and it was watchable, but nothing happened that you didn’t already expect.

Prepare to become obsolete

Rated R for nonstop strong violence, and for language and nudity.
Rated O by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 23 with an influence density of 2.21 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring Michael Jai White standing around a lot in a tight shirt, Bill Goldberg adding his delicate touch to the collective oeuvre of wreslters-cum-actors, and some Belgian guy.

Viewed 2005-06-16 by Susi, Mike, Dane, David, and David.

Although the idea of a third sequel to a Van Damme movie sounds like the perfect film for Golan-Globus/Cannon, it’s not a Golan-Globus movie. Van Damme came on to the scene too late for more than a couple of series starters, like Bloodsport and Cyborg, but it’s good to see that the Golan-Globus ideal of crappy action movie sequels carries on. Universal Soldier: The Return is one of those sequels.

I don’t think that any of us had seen all—or perhaps any—of the previous Universal Soldier movies, or at least we couldn’t remember them, so there were a couple of elements of this movie that, even with the unsubtle recapitulations, were left unexplained due to our ignorance. The key issue was whether or not Van Damme’s character was an undead abomination. I mean, he died in the first one, right? They talked about how he used to be a Universal Soldier, and part of that process involves being dead, so I’m not really sure how the reversal would have worked. I tried to derive the plots of the other three movies from the single sentence plot summaries on IMdb, but all I could gather from that is that Universal Soldier III appears to be the same movie as its successor.

What makes Universal Soldier: The Return a bad movie is the same thing that makes most bad action movies bad: it does a good job of shooting things and blowing things up but at the expense of a coherent story. If you don’t try to keep track of what’s going on, it might be ok. For example, in the beginning of the movie, they can’t blow up the Unisol compound after all the Universal Soldiers are taken over by the evil self-aware computer (when will people learn to stop making self-aware computers?) because it would release all kinds of biochemical weapons into the air, but at the end, after all the soldiers are alreay out anyhow, the only answer is to blow the thing up. I found this a bit confusing. I also found it confusing that no one was ever thrown into the big tanks of acid. I’ll bet that this movie wouldn’t even be on the list if only they had done something with all that acid.

In all, things blew up, which was cool, but I would not call the violence “nonstop,” nor was it always “strong.” Regardless, they should have used the MPAA rating as the tagline.