Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A Brilliant Conflict

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I don't ever write reviews however I felt compelled to alert potential viewers about this "film" . Around the first third of the film there are scenes of prolongued rapid Strobe light flashing . Although after the first set of flashing I stopped watching, I felt pretty nauseous aterwards even though I never had any issues in the past. Some movies are so bad, that they are good. But this is not the case. Again, perhaps the remain 2/3 were better but couldn't handle anymore. People with epilepsy problems : STAY AWAY!

At times this movie tries to be Terminator. There are lots of scenes of super human killers stalking through closed spaces (Terminator police station scene) and of super human killers driving a service truck while chasing the good guy (almost every Terminator movie).At times this movie tries to be Universal Soldier. But those pieces feel thrown in just to warrant the title.The fights are so MMA they become boring.Characters' motivations aren't clear. The Van Damme character and the Dolph character seem to have some relationship, but they're never in the same scene. Looks like each one filmed his scenes on separate days.For Universal Soldier, the problem is not enough action. There are long, woodenly acted scenes of discovery. Even the action scenes have over long build ups. A lot of this movie feels like one of the modern, SFX and camera trick dependent horror movies - not interesting, not scary, but the director showed his technical expertise.The lead actor is awful - a body built, MMA guy with a generic Euro accent.It would be a blessing if someone could remove the memory of this crap from my brain.JCVD's movies were sometimes promoted with the concept of Van Damme-age - "maximum Van Damme-age, double the Van Damme-age. This one is minimum Van Damme-age.

What's that, you've never seen Universal Soldier Seven? Welp, here's the info:Dolph + Van Damage = Dolph DamageSo if we take D+D x VD = DVD then it appears this movie invented DVDs.Plus this is the Soldier of the Universe and he is Reckoning. Reckoning.It is also a day. Of the week? Maybe. You'll have to watch and see. The ending *may* surprise you, because it is actually a day of the month. Octember.Brazillion/Twelv

Three years ago, director John Hyams' UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION breathed new life into a thought-dead franchise and thereby made one of the best action pictures of the year. To say that I was interested in seeing this follow-up is an understatement: with a good deal of the previous one's cast and crew returning, along with the new additions of martial arts' "it" guy Scott Adkins and cult fight choreographer Larnell Stovall, this one looked like a surefire topper to its immediate prequel and another great action outing. Did the movie live up to my high expectations? ...well, at least partially. This is, without question, a great action outing with some of the better fight scenes put out this year. However, the same way that REGENERATION was a huge departure from the style of its bouncier predecessors, so too is DAY OF RECKONING a departure from the standard action genre as we know it, with a storyline so far removed from what I was expecting that it took a bit of time for me to contemplate whether it counted for or against the movie. Overall, this one's definitely worth checking out and even buying, but depending on your expectations, it counts as the end of the UNIVERSAL SOLDIER franchise.The story: a husband and father (Adkins, UNDISPUTED 3) is beaten half to death and sees his family murdered before him by Luc Devereaux, the maverick Unisol (Jean-Claude Van Damme). Recovering from his injuries and plagued by inexplicable hallucinations, he sets out to untangle the mystery behind the killing and exact vengeance on Devereaux.For those of you who watched the last film, you'll glean from summary that things do not neatly pick up from where the story left off. Looking at the cast list and film poster, you'll no doubt also wonder what the heck Dolph Lundgren and Andrei Arlovski are doing in this picture, since they'd recently been killed off. And as a matter of fact, why is Luc now killing people? Questions like these, along with several others presented by the film's narrative, have flustered enough viewers for them to declare this a "semi sequel" that's not necessarily part of the same story arc. Me, I think it is a proper sequel, and that we're to assume that a good deal of time has passed since the previous flick and this one. Luc Devereaux has become an enigmatic figure to both allies and enemies with a rather grandiose master plan. The character played by Andrei Arlovski is not the same as his last one. And as for Dolph Lundgren...well, he was cloned once before, wasn't he? I've been able to placate myself with these answers, but people who don't want this kind of ambiguity are probably going to be disappointed.Personally, what jarred me more than any part of the plot was the style of the movie. With its numerous storyline twists, hallucination scenes, and insane amounts of bloodletting, this is very nearly a horror film. Having the characters rediscover parts of their personal history has always been a component of the series, but in DAY OF RECKONING, it's an uninhibitedly dark process, complete with psycho-thriller imagery. I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about it, since this - more than any of the character-related aspects - makes the film feel wholly different from its predecessors. With that said, it does inspire some decent intensity out of the performers. Despite his third-name billing, Scott is clearly the lead in this movie and carries things well, giving a strong performance and again demonstrating why he is the new top action hero in all respects even if Hollywood hasn't caught on yet. Van Damme has surprisingly few scenes in the movie, but those he does partake in are good: he doesn't even need to speak anymore to get his points across, as demonstrated in any scene he shares with his Unisol subordinates (he has those, by the way). Dolph Lundgren has even less screen time than Van Damme, but does okay with another crazy monologue. Andrei Arlovski doesn't have much to act, and love interest Mariah Bonner isn't very memorable.Production-wise, the movie is strong. Action-wise, the film is a powerhouse of extremely brutal hand-to-hand action. Is it as good as I had been expecting? ...it might be better to point that it wasn't *what* I was expecting. After their first collaboration in the aforementioned UNDISPUTED 3 set the bar for all future martial arts flicks, I had been expecting that Adkins and Larnell Stovall would present us with more lightning-speed martial arts wizardry, but what they delivered instead are brawls. Violent, gritty, gory brawls. I think this had to do with the physical constraints of many of the performers, and in a way, it's disappointing...but then again, the fights tend to be better than good and easy to appreciate for both the physicality of the performers and the gamely shooting and editing style of the filmmakers. My personal favorite brawl is the second showdown between Adkins and Arlovski, wherein they beat the hell out of each other with baseball bats. While not the barn-burner I had been hoping it to be, Adkins vs. Van Damme during the finale is definitely the best fight the two have had - beating the snot out of their outings in THE SHEPHERD: BORDER PATROL and ASSASSINATION GAMES.Whether or not you appreciate the movie, I think, depends on both how much you enjoyed the last film and how far you think the action genre can be bent until the filmmakers have to make a choice whether they want to make an action film or a horror flick. The strength of this one's action scenes determined that it could be bent pretty far this time, but overall, I could have done without the change in direction. While there's nothing in the film that I don't explicitly dislike, the things I'm uncertain about keep this one from a higher score.