Universal Soldier
That’s the third film in a row where Van Damme gets buck naked and doesn’t actually fuck the girl, he really was the Tom Cruise of his day.
There are so many endings to this film, it feels like a modern superhero film. Never Stop Stopping. No trademark Emmerich explosions here either, except the early one in the gas station.
The writing is truly atrocious. Whoever chose to cast Van Damme as a child-like amnesiac is genius, but that scene on the diner shows he’s no Jackie Chan, keep to the punching and kicking.
The same genius then went insane and cast Dolph “Johnny Mnemonic” Lundgren as Kurtz from Apocalipse Now, with so many lines. They cancel each other out!
Without a strong villain, a random woman has to carry the whole film on her back, doing the city slicker shtick, but she is no Linda Fiorentino.
Of course Van Damme is from Louisiana, her mother speaks French, and he’s a farm boy. Still doesn’t explain the accent!
There’s a prelude in ‘Nam, where Kurtz is going nuts, murdering civilians with even more gusto than usual, and our hero intervenes, but they both shoot the other. It’s unclear how 25 years later they are both in a crack team of Seal Team 6 that saves the Hoover Dam from being blown up by unspecified terrorists. They are UniSol, not a brand of artificial juice.
The intrepid reporter tries to find more after being shit canned, and gets her cameraman murdered execution-style by UniSols. This triggers the hero’s memory and he rescues the reporter girl, thinking he is back in ‘Nam. They ran out of gas, so he just pushes the van at 30 miles per hour.
All that whizzbang tech inside him makes him overheat, so he cools down in some motel while she tries to phone her paper. But by that time, TV are already pinning her cameraman’s death on her. Then the rest of the UniSols are right on their tail.
The protagonists are being chased, but they always find a way to run away. The military villains that kickstarted the whole secret black book program get a call from somewhere and decide to shut the whole thing down, when they are literally in the sticks, but Kurtz goes nuts and kills them.
It’s Kurtz vs our heroes now, and as mentioned there are always several endings: the prison bus canyon jump, the parents’s house explosion, then the farming equipment, twice!
The final battle is not over the top enough, they should have used Cyborg footage.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.