Universal Soldier: The Return
Oh god, this has too much Jean-Claude Van Damme attempts at acting, and not enough roundhouse kicks. There’s a HAL ripoff, and they even lift scenes from 2001, where the ‘puter is listening about his own demise across a window and goes rogue.
At least the fight scenes and explosions are extremely over the top and inventive. There’s a big burly wrestler that tries and fails to get Van Damme all the time, it’s almost a silent film with dialogues.
The journalist love interest that starts off hating the protagonist is pretty annoying, it reaches Temple of Doom levels.
At least the kid gets knocked out by the protagonist’s hot coworker. The American healthcare system strikes again: the doctors can save the kid’s life, but need parental consent for some reason.
HAL self-miniaturises and implants himself in the brain of a perfect body: Michael Jai White. He does look like a stud muffin, compared to dadbod Van Damme, and you can actually understand what he is talking about.
Van Damme figures this out and takes the journalist to kill HAL using the Internet. She changes in the van, so that he can take sideways look at her tits, then they find the only place with power and Internet: a massive strip joint.
Van Damme gets to work: he gets in the back, on their phone sex hotline, and jacks into the matrix or something. He finds out who is hacking HAL: a Paprika ripoff! Some disgruntled ex-worker which is a punk rocker now.
Before the final showdown, there’s still time to Van Damme kill her hot coworker, since she was resurrected. He has his big showdown with Michael Jai White during which a Burj Khalifa’s worth of plate glass is broken, it goes to ridiculous levels.
There’s still the real ending, where the journalist clocks the general, kicks the wrestler’s ass, and Van Damme blows up the base, to meet his daughter and her future evil stepmother.
There’s even redemption for the hot coworker, but she dies anyway, since there’s already a big titted hottie as surrogate mother, and a blonde White cheerleader at that.
The music is hideous. Nu metal with lyrics in action scenes just doesn’t work. Ironically, there’s a poster for Prodigy’s Fat of the Land in the strip club!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.