Brain cells died on Saturday night. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning was the most phenomenally bad movie I've ever seen. I did laugh out loud a few times, purely out of disbelief that any film could be this bad. There was no discernible plot, but that didn't deter the filmmaker from leaving plenty of holes in what minimal amount there was. Maybe it would have helped if I had seen the direct-to-DVD Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Oh, by the way, it was shown in 3D. What 3D?
Neither Jean-Claude Van Damme nor Dolph Lundgren had much screen time or dialog. Lundgren was, as usual, a purely evil charicature. But what happened to the heroic Luc Deveraux of the first two films of the series? I was really disappointed that Van Damme's Luc had become an evil cartoon. I wasn't sure if his makeup for the final fight was modeled on Darth
Vader without his helmet or Heath Ledger's Joker or both. I found myself wondering if it was to disguise a stunt double during the fight scenes. Scott Adkins was passable as our hero, John, but it was so wrong to make Luc the villain.
Right from the opening scene, the non-stop graphic violence was way over the top, and the relentless pursuit of John by a hulking unisol (Andrei Arlovski) seemed to be a pathetic attempt to emulate the Terminator films. There was also an exorbitant amount of gratuitous sex, bordering on, if not crossing over to, porn. The only reason I stayed was the foolish hope that the real Luc would appear, destroy the evil Luc, and save the day. Only in my dreams.
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