Universal Solider: The Return

Some movies you go into expecting they'll be bad, but that they'll have redeeming qualities too: laughably bad acting, cool fights, hot babes. Something to take the edge off the badness you know will be present. Well, this movie is bad, but it's bad in ways I could never have imagined when I entered the movie theater, and its redeeming qualities are notably nonpresent for most of the film. The first straight-up action film of the summer [of 1999] is a complete dud, a waste of time for everyone involved including the viewer, a lackluster, inconsistent, illiterate piece of junk. And what's worse, the acting isn't quite bad enough to laugh at, the fights aren't really cool, and the Designated Hot Chick is so annoying one starts rooting for her to get iced at about the 30-second mark in her screen time. I mean, I wasn't expecting Merchant and Ivory. But they couldn't even give me Simpson and Bruckheimer.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is at the center of this. I cannot for the life of me figure out why he didn't just stick with making movies about kickboxing tournaments, except that he doesn't get to hang out with babes in those. Anyway, this film is so low-budget they apparently couldn't hire his dialect coach, with the result that he's even more incomprehensible than usual. His fight scenes, with the exception of a few at the end where the invincible supercomputer is obsessed with taking him alive so the Universal Soldiers have to fight JCVD with karate, are accomplished with gunfire and are possibly the most boring gunfights I have ever seen (they'd be competing with "Hard Rain"). It's strange how camerawork that gives one no sense of place at all and actually actively but unintentionally disorients can put a damper on one's enjoyment of these things. Plus, JCVD looks totally uninvolved.

His hot chick, Heidi Schanz, is not really that hot and is the single most irritating character I have seen on a movie screen in quite some time. From her toddler-like tantrum of insistence that the media be allowed inside a rapidly self-destructing weapons facility to her completely inorganic development of feeling for JCVD, one wonders why JCVD isn't dating Kiana Tom (his hotter UniSol tester companion), except that maybe he doesn't want to get involved with a relationship at work.

Of the actors, none is worthy of note except Michael Jai White, who plays the body the invincible supercomputer has selected for itself and conveys the gravity and majesty that would be expected of such an adversary while having pecs the size of bowling balls and not a gram of fat on his body. He looks like a Michaelangelo anatomy sketch and fights like a man, and he should be in more and better movies.

But the sins of this movie are basically in its careless handling of details and its totally flawed structure. To take the latter first, JCVD's forte is not gunplay, it's karate fighting. He should be doing that for the entire movie. It's not like gunplay is less expensive than karate fighting to film, so what's the point? Anyway, a high-tech karate fest is what I, and dare I say most people who see this movie, would expect. Still, even with the lethargic and uninteresting gunfighting, and allowing for Ms. Schanz's total uselessness, there are a few cool action scenes which would get this movie at least a C- if not for the following errors of judgment:

1. Normally, when an omniscient supercomputer says it wants someone taken alive, it does not then blow up the building that person is standing in. There is, as they say, no percentage in it, except to blow something up. This is the point at which I started really hating this movie.
2. Or maybe it was the willful misspelling of "anomaly" as "anomalie" earlier in the film. How hard is it, really, to have someone with a casual acquaintance with the English language look at things you write on a computer screen? Hell, even MS Word understands the error there.
3. While I understand that all action movies are supposed to have strip club scenes, I can't for the life of me understand why. This one is no exception, and you'll see how far they're stretching it when I tell you that JCVD goes into one to...access the Internet. And then he starts a brawl for reasons which remain unclear to me upon further examination, which is mainly an excuse for strippers to start beating up patrons. What?
4. Ms. Schanz, when protesting that the general standing next to her is about to blow up the building with JCVD in it, is so frustrated by the general's unwillingness to put JCVD's life above the goal of stopping the above-mentioned omniscient supercomputer and his army of indestructible reanimated dead soldiers that she says, "You leave me no choice!" and punches him like she is a trained killing machine or something. This, of course, has no effect. The inability of the director to make this into the oasis of hilarity it could have been with even moderately competent direction sealed the coffin.

I really did not expect much from this film, just a nice C+ with enough rousing action scenes to make me forget how bad it was momentarily. What does it say that I didn't even get that?

Attractive Man Count: 0.

Attractive Woman Count: 2 (Ms. Schanz may not be extremely hot, but she ain't bad, and Ms. Tom is definitely attractive).

Overall Grade: D-.

It says we need Arnold Schwarzenegger's new movie NOW, dammit! Lindemann

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