Universal Soldier (1992)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Strong and Moving!

Don't Believe the Hype

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I've been a Van Damme fan since I can't remember and while I do understand why critics may be harsh on him as an actor or his movies, it is not hard to get why he has such a ''cult following'', his movies are fun, simple and entertaining. Universal Soldier may be the best of his golden era. A movie that has everything you need in an action flick: a little drama, humor, cool car chases and of course the action itself. Even thou the main event is the clash between Luc and Sargent Scott, a character like Veronica Roberts still manages to stay in the spotlight, making her to this day one of my favorite female characters in an action movie. This is always a safe choice for me when I'm feeling nostalgic.

Early 90's decade was most known for action and martial arts movies, they were very popular also here on the Balkans and i still remember how on television they just played movies with Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Seagal, Chuck Norris and others, our television channels still time to time play this kind of movies. I am admitting when i was a kid i really enjoyed action movies, i am still enjoying them time to time, when i want to relax and not to think of hard themes i always find something in this sphere to watch or rewatch, so these days i started to rewatch early movies with Jean Claude Van Damme. Of this early Van Damme flicks, Universal Soldier is most known of them. But in my opinion the worst one. I really enjoy campy and cheesy movies but this one, has nothing of that, it is just totally brainless and even the action sequences are badly done. And you also have one of the most annoying companion i have ever seen on movie, actress Ally Walker, i hoped she will die in some part of the movie but no she is there till the end. But when you see that this one is directed by one of the worst directors in history of cinema Roland Emmerich than everything is clear. I only give this movie the rate 3/10 because of the scene with Van Damme eating a tons of food in the drive-in, i laughed so hard, so stupid but funny. Watch this movie if you are only die hard Van Damme fan and because of the scene i mentioned, on another hand skip it.

Roland Emmerich turns out decent work when he starts with a decent idea. And this movie is based on an extremely cool idea: a secret government project to use the reanimated corpses of dead soldiers as 'UniSols'. They're like killer combat zombies equipped to receive commands remotely, impervious to pain, quick to heal, and pretty much unstoppable although they tend to overheat if they stay active for too long. There isn't a huge amount of action in the film, but in between scenes we get to see a lot of Lundgren's bad guy one-liners and attitude. Van Damme doesn't have many fights either until the end, when he goes up against the Lundgren character.This is a fun, violent movie, with both stars hamming it up, Van Damme the more stoic of the two. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more marital arts in the film. Oh, there are a couple of kicks thrown but no real Karate fighting. Though Van Damme was well known for busting' moves by 1992, Dolph had only recently started illustrating his abilities in that department, particularly with the previous year's "Showdown in Little Tokyo", co-starring Brandon Lee. The action is not bad, otherwise, with plenty of stuff blowing' up and dudes being thrown through windows n' stuff. Overall, it has good action, a few cheesy moments but also a few memorable catch phrases (some of which I can't repeat here).Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

The story isn't all that original and is reminiscent of Terminator and many other movies, but who cares? It's Dolph vs. Jean-Claude Van Damme and it has one of my favourite fight scenes in the history of cinema. Dolph's bad guy death is the greatest of all time: "You're discharged Sarge".It marked the beginning of the ascent for the mighty Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin combo, as they showed their love of B-grade science fiction (dead soldiers brought back to life to fight!) with an assured hand at both carnage and comedy. Van Damme shines as a lethal innocent, a side to his acting that really helped to set him apart from the ever invulnerable likes of Seagal and Schwarzenegger. There's a genuinely sweet sense of naivety to Luc Deveraux, marked with the existential tragedy of being a man out of his own time, which makes his plight even more compelling, especially knowing that he was killed for trying to do the right thing. I hold that it's the same quality that makes Jet Li so great in the likes of Unleashed, but it's a role that really helped to humanise and differentiate Van Damme from the crowd. I'd be remiss not to mention the mighty Lundgren, too, as deranged Andrew Scott (a man, it seems, who just won't stay dead), who fills the running time with endless quotes that I'm still partial to impersonating, from "Do you hear me?" to "It's empty!" It's Dolph's greatest performance, and the sheer mania, combined with his penchant for necklaces made of body parts, is just superb.