Sometimes you can actually visualize precious minutes of your life slipping away as you sit back and do nothing. You want to reach out and grab those fleeting moments and pull them back, but you can't. They're gone forever.
Let's say, for example, you make the mistake of going to see "Universal Solider: The Return," Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest feeble attempt to resurrect his career. In addition to watching a thoroughly lousy movie, you'll also be awarded the chance to lose an hour and a half of your life you might otherwise spend on considerably more pleasant endeavors, such as having your feet scraped by a podiatrist's scapel, or taking a leisurely tour of a local toxic waste dump.
Van Damme reportedly thinks this squalid sequel to 1992's "Universal Soldier" (itself only a modest box office success) is going to put him on the comeback trail. He's leading himself down the primrose path.
Misdirected by Mic Rodgers, "Return" manages to take a good many sure-fire ingredients and combine them into an almost unwatchable fiasco. Speaking of unwatchable, Van Damme, who's gotten more attention lately for his seamy personal life than for his screen appearances, looks prematurely aged and unsteady throughout the movie; obviously, those recent scandals have taken a toll. His dialogue sounds even more garbled than usual: As he's trying to evacuate a building under attack, he reminds someone "diss ees nut uh kiss-miss puh-rad," and it might take you several minutes to decipher what he's actually trying to say.
Then again, most of the lines in "Return" are so ridiculous you'll wish you couldn't understand them. The most absurd go to intrepid TV reporter Erin Young (the uncharismatic Heidi Schanz), who tags along with deathless tough guy Luc Deveraux (Van Damme) to cover what happens when a supercomputer begins giving orders to the Universal Soldiers, the elite secret army of recycled fighters of which Deveraux was once a member.
How dedicated is Erin to her work? So dedicated she assures Deveraux "I'm not getting killed until I get my story in." So dedicated she stands up to a bossy general who tries to shoo her away by reminding him "you can't just throw the media around like we're cattle!". Yeah, take that, you military fascists!
The appalling script might be forgivable if the movie had any creative action sequences or anything original to offer. But aside from a bewildering scene in which Deveraux and Erin have to infiltrate a strip joint to use the establishment's computer (!), fresh ideas are hard to come by in "Return" and the fight choreography is laughably bad. The big showdown between Deveraux and his nemesis S.E.T.H. (Michael Jai White, of "Spawn") is confusingly photographed and surprisingly unexciting, especially given the lengthy build-up to it, and having a musclebound type make wisecracks after each brush with danger -- for example, chuckling "I'm just warming up" when he's set on fire -- was a whole lot funnier 15 years ago in "The Terminator."
At least "Return" gets the soundtrack it deserves as each brawl or chase is accompanied by anonymous heavy metal numbers, most of which sound like somebody's little brother trying out his imitation of Eddie Van Halen.
The cherry on top of this rancid cake comes before the movie even starts, as we're presented with an enormously unappealing trailer for "Simon Sez," some kind of action flick starring Dennis Rodman (!!) as some kind of hero who goes around pushing street punks up against walls and growling "tell me what's going on, before I go Picasso on your ass and rearrange your face." It's almost enough to make you want to cry, "Hey! We're moviegoers! You can't just throw us around like we're cattle!". James Sanford
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews