UNIVERSAL SOLDIER
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(sbb@panix.com)
If you watch any television at all, you have by now likely seen over a dozen commercials for this summer's latest action/exploitation film, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER. The commercials look good -- great stunts -- and they sound good -- with T2's soundtrack in the background, no less -- and they even manage to show us brief glimpses of Dolph Lundgren doing something other than standing in one place looking like he's waiting for someone to change his batteries. But yet something doesn't seem quite right, does it? Something -- talent? inspiration? originality? -- seems to be missing, and even the studio's advertising department seems to know it, given the strange come-on we get in at least some of the commercials: that UNIVERSAL SOLDIER is from the same studios that brought us TOTAL RECALL and T2.
Telling the Phantom that a film is "from the studios that brought you TOTAL RECALL and TERMINATOR 2" is like telling a gourmet that a restaurant is "on the same block as The Four Seasons"; it's an interesting fact, but good neighbors do not a good dining experience make -- it's what's in the kitchen that counts.
The latest from Tri-Star and Carolco is intended to be a quickie ripoff of other, better films, one of which -- TERMINATOR 2 -- was in fact distributed and backed by this studio and production company last year. In this, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER succeeds: it is, indeed, from the people who once brought us a much better film, and it is, indeed, a quickie ripoff of at least part of that film. Ads usually don't lie, try as they might, though sometimes they do assume that no phan of Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude Van Damme could possibly be smart enough to see through this transparent and slightly pathetic ruse. (The Phantom is no particular phan of either, though he did enjoy BLOODSPORT some years ago. And of course, he is by now well versed in decoding the deceptive advertising surrounding most Hollywood product; he would also like to note that the Phantom's law of print advertising has once again proven correct: the print ads for UNIVERSAL SOLDIER do indeed look as hastily prepared and as ill-conceived as the film itself.)
Changing metaphors for a moment, if action films were parts of a city, then T2 would be the Empire State Building; UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, on the other hand, is more on the scale of the little newsstand located across the street. So why the slide from the observation deck of big-budget American action film perfection to the sub-basement of the teeming, direct-to-video hordes? The most likely reason is that Carolco isn't in off the ledge of near-bankruptcy just yet, and money is still tight; perhaps it will be talked back in by the studio suicide squad (still distraught from Orion's recent plunge to the sidewalk of insolvency some weeks ago), but it's likely to be out on that ledge for some time, listening to the cries of "Jump!", "Jump!" and watching battalions of lawyers scurrying this way and that (looking very much like ants) thirty floors below. While we wait to see if Carolco leaves an over-leveraged dent in the sidewalk and joins Cannon, DEG and Vestron in that great independent studio in the sky, we can be sure that there will be no more $100 million Schwarzenegger epics for quite some time -- at least not "from the studios that brought you TOTAL RECALL and TERMINATOR 2."
Instead we get UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, complete with the top two Schwarzenegger wannabes, each with a less intelligible accent and each with less acting ability, but neither with enough box office clout to command a Scharwzenegger-sized percentage of the gross. Add to the mix a sure-fire plot (or rather, pieces of two different sure-fire plots); a director whose film is going direct-to-theater for the first time in his rather short career; pump up the audience's expectations with some clever advertising and bits and pieces of T2's score lifted from the cutting room floor; and you've got product that can't possibly miss -- provided you spend nearly as much on advertising as you do on the rest of the production. It's going to be 4 weeks and out for UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, so timing is all. Get it in the theaters as BATMAN is cresting and as LETHAL 3 is waning, but before the major studios have time to gear up for their August releases, and you're assured of at least making back your production costs before the film hits video and foreign distribution in six months; the rest is gravy.
(THE LAST BOY SCOUT used this same strategy last summer, to similar effect. We B-movie phans will take our death and destruction whenever and wherever we can get it, even if it means that we have to watch Bruce Willis remind us once again of how difficult it is to make a good action film.)
Of course, there's nothing wrong with a film being a quickie ripoff -- after all, some of the best action and horror films of all time have been nothing more than low-budget first-attempts by talented but unknown directors. John Carpenter, George Miller, Joel and Ethan Coen, and John McNaughton may be well-known and -respected these days, but it wasn't so long ago that they were all struggling young filmmakers with a passion for the offbeat. Their drop-dead first films show how much can be accomplished without Hollywood backing, distribution, or financing.
There is, however, something wrong with UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, and it has nothing to do with financing, though it does have something to do with Hollywood: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER is terminally dumb. And when it's not dumb, it's outright silly, which is even worse. B-movie phans know that things can be nonsensical in a horror or action film; things can be obscure; things can even be dumbfounding. What they can't be is any dumber or sillier than they have to be -- or if they are, then the films have to be so skillfully made that the audience never notices.
Well, in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER we notice; and that's the problem in a nutshell (if one can call 1000 words -- and counting -- a nutshell): we're never able to sufficiently suspend our disbelief and really get into the film. As a result, all we can do is notice Van Damme's incredibly bad acting (or incredibly good acting, assuming that his intention was to impersonate a bridge support), the non-existent rapport between him and Lundgren, and the general air of insufficient funds that surrounds the production. They do send a semi off a cliff, and they do blow up a gas station, but other than that there's little to differentiate UNIVERSAL SOLDIER from any of a number of bad direct-to-video action flicks.
And that's a real shame, since the premise seemed so full of possibilities. The basic idea behind UNIVERSAL SOLDIER is that the government has saved the bodies of dead soldiers from the Vietnam war era and developed a serum which both keeps the bodies in peak condition and turns the soldiers' minds into complete blanks. (Given the need to cast such a film, the choice of Van Damme and Lundgren should be obvious.) After being injected with the magic serum, the soldiers can perform super-human acts, such as swimming at high speed up to a dam without getting their clothes wet; pushing a car at 30 miles per hour down a desert road without getting covered with dust; jumping through supporting walls in a motel without causing the entire structure to collapse; and repeatedly getting in and out of a ridiculous-looking semi that looks to have been left over from a TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES episode. (Though Van Damme and Lundgren are as interchangeable as any two of the turtles -- we don't even get different color bandannas to tell them apart -- Shredder was nowhere in sight. Thoughts of hitting rock bottom and being in the sewer did cross the Phantom's mind more than once, however.)
The problem is that the serum doesn't work well enough, and occasional thoughts and brief moments of real acting ability appear in both Lundgren and Van Damme as each relives his final minutes of mortal combat in a very domestic-looking Vietnamese village. (Lundgren is the crazy, evil, bad sergeant who has definite Mai Lai tendencies; Van Damme is the innocent farm boy who tries to save one of the villagers.) These brief moments are stolen shamelessly from the much better film ROBOCOP, though instead of humanizing the Universal Soldiers they exist only to provide a pretext for Lundgren to go completely berserk and start hunting down Van Damme at all costs. At this point, the filmmakers jettison most of the science fiction aspect of the film and reduce it to a typical -- and tedious -- "superhuman good guy vs. superhuman bad guy" flick. There is never any sense of the place of this technology in future society, as there was in ROBOCOP or TOTAL RECALL; instead, it's used as a gimmick and as a prop, and it is in general dispensed with at the earliest possible opportunity.
Before this happens, however, another problem surfaces -- one that should probably have been considered more carefully before it was tossed into UNIVERSAL SOLDIER'S script. It seems that too much activity causes the soldiers to overheat, and in the case of Van Damme, to suffer from Michael Douglas Syndrome: the uncontrollable urge to show the audience your naked rear end. Fortunately, a quick restorative nap in the freezer section of the Evil Scientist's Semi of Doom or, alternatively, burying yourself under bags of ice from free and convenient gas station and motel ice dispensers helps to cool things off. Thus, the Universal Soldiers can never be separated from either the Evil Semi of Doom or a roadside motel for too long, and thus do the filmmakers inflict the first of many incidents of extreme dumbness on their hapless audience. The sight of this big, black Mayflower-looking van of Doom -- the Van Damme Van -- lumbering along the empty highways in hot pursuit of Jean-Claude and his reporter girlfriend -- did the Phantom mention the Turtles a while back? -- was enough to start the Phantom choking with laughter. (Phans of the classic disaster spoof THE BIG BUS will know exactly why the Phantom was giggling in his popcorn; fortunately for the filmmakers, most of the film's target audience will be about a decade too young to remember that paragon of silliness.)
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER might have been a good cat and mouse film (like THE HITCHER) had it stayed away from the Evil Scientist shenanigans and left the Van of Doom in the garage; it could have been a decent ROBOCOP or MANIAC COP ripoff had it lost Van Damme altogether and concentrated on the havoc a run-amok Universal Dolph might cause; but alas, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER incorporates both too little and too much of these ideas into a badly blended stew of action and science fiction. ALIEN 3 stumbled earlier this year in much the same way, and it now stands as one of the most ill-conceived action/horror sequels of all time. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER is not, at least, a sequel to anything, and given the lukewarm audience reaction as the closing credits rolled, the chances that UNIVERSAL SOLDIER 2 will be made are -- fortunately -- vanishingly slim.
Some months ago the Phantom panned BASIC INSTINCT as an overwrought and extremely silly naked lesbian ice-pick killer flick; however, at least BASIC INSTINCT was competently made. Verhoeven may have a singularly repellent vision, but at least he *has* a vision, and one that shows clearly in his films. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER has the look of a film that sprang not from someone's imagination but rather from a corporate board room, with more attention given to an accountant's ledger than to the film's near-illiterate script. That's the real problem with UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: more than the general air of penny-pinching that surrounds the film; more than the complete inability of either Lundgren or Van Damme to act -- even in the most rudimentary sense as mindless, brainwashed automatons; more than the loopy Evil Van of Doom; the film suffers from a real lack of vision -- a distressing lack of the kind of energy needed to keep any action film moving and to keep B-movie audiences interested.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER makes one forget why one thought that LETHAL 3 had any problems at all; in fact, the Phantom plans to see Mel and friends one more time this summer, if only to see how it should be done. Even though it's far from perfect, LETHAL 3 is simply in a different class than UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, and between it, BATMAN and Clint Eastwood's very good-looking western coming next month, only die-hard Van Damme phans will want to go out of their way to see UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, a film that -- sadly -- doesn't even deserve to be in the same sentence as the words "die hard".
: The Phantom : sbb@panix.com : cmcl2!panix!sbb
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