by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

I wouldn’t call myself an “expert” or even a “connoisseur” but my weakness is that I love trashy action flicks. Cannon Films features like American Ninja. Full Moon pictures like Trancers. Direct-to-video knock-offs of better-known movies like Terminator. I grew up watching these kinds of movies, and even the bad ones are good to me. Junky action movies are like pizza: They’re all good, some are just better than others.

The original Universal Soldier, directed by Roland Emmerich, is a bit better than it needs to be. Roland Emmerich isn’t my favorite director around, but the guy knows how to make a movie look good. Hell, take a look at Independence Day, those special effects have aged wonderfully. Universal Soldier is capably acted by all parties involved: Jean-Claude Van Damme has some fun moments, and does some of his trademark kicking to show off his skills. Dolph Lundgren–who I always felt was underrated as an actor and as a screen presence–goes full psycho and is clearly having a blast doing it. 

Universal Soldier’s plot isn’t much more than an excuse to string a series of action sequences and set pieces together: Luc Deveraux (Van Damme) and Andrew Scott (Lundgren) served together in Vietnam. Scott snapped and began killing innocent villagers. Deveraux tries to stop him and, in the process, the two wind up killing each other. Decades later, their corpses are resurrected, their minds wiped clean of memories, and reprogrammed as efficient, genetically modified killing machines.

In a Terminator-meets-RoboCop turn of events, memories begin to resurface, as do old grudges, and these two supersoldiers with the strength of ten men duke it out throughout the southwestern United States, from Arizona to Utah, and it eventually ends in a personal, bloody confrontation.

It’s fine.

Universal Soldier is totally decent, and a financial success you would imagine would spawn a series of direct-to-video sequels. It was the 90s, and so it was the perfect time to have a financially successful theatrical release followed by a series of sequels of varying quality and budgets.

It was followed, in 1998, by two made-for-TV movies that are dreadful. They were intending to create a television show based on the success of those two movies, which didn’t happen. Then, one year later, there was an immediate sequel to the first movie, called Universal Soldier: The Return, which was more in line with what to expect with a typical action movie sequel, released way too long after the first movie: Serviceable, acceptable, nothing special. 

Ten years after that, in 2009, was the release of the first of two direct-to-video sequels directed by John Hyams: Universal Soldier: Regeneration.

I was surprised as hell when I saw the general consensus of the movie. It got mixed critical reviews, veering toward the lower end, and it has something like a 5.0 rating on IMDB. This is a goddamned outrage, people. Universal Soldier: Regeneration kicks ass. 

Regeneration ignores the sequels that followed and works as a direct follow-up to the original. In it, Deveraux, played with a quiet intensity by Van Damme, is now an older man, racked with the trauma of what his mind, his body, his spirit has been put through. He’s prone to violent outbursts and he’s trying to find himself and become “human”, and abandon his redesign function as a resurrected supersoldier. He is carried away in the middle of the night for one final job and called back into duty, where all of his learning and undoing of trauma hangs in the balance.

A terrorist group has held the Russian president’s children hostage and his holed up in the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The group has the most perfectly designed UniSol (Andrei Arlovski, a real-life fighter) to date and all attempted military intervention ends in disaster. The killing machine can absorb bullets, survives explosions and in hand-to-hand combat can easily dispatch the most skilled fighters.

Regeneration is a thrill ride. It opens with a bang, and an incredible series of driving stunts, then barrels headlong into the ending. It never lets up for a minute. But in between these moments, we have time to understand the gravity of the situation. The action sequences are filmed brilliantly and with excitement, but we care about the characters. It’s a fantastic movie.

Hyams would then helm the follow-up to Regeneration, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.

Regeneration is a thrill-ride. Day of Reckoning is… I don’t even know what the fuck. And I mean that in the best possible way. Regeneration is a very well-made action movie. Day of Reckoning is a sci-fi horror movie mystery, and it’s genuinely upsetting and horrifying.

Day of Reckoning begins with a memory. John (Scott Adkins) is awoken in the middle of the night and his family is murdered before his eyes, by none other than Luc Deveraux, who we knew to be the hero of all the films that preceded it. Nothing, nothing is what it seems in Day of Reckoning. Memories can’t be trusted. Clones are rampant. Time, and revenge, are both cyclical devices doomed to repeat themselves. 

In what could have been a traditional follow-up, Hyams is more interested in exploiting the story for the inherent terror just underneath. At the end of the day, these soldiers are the reanimated tissue of dead bodies, juiced up and programmed to be incredibly efficient killers. The movie poses a lot of questions that never get answered, but we’re given enough information to hint at possibilities. Why is Deveraux now a villain? Is it even the same Deveraux? Is he really a villain, or is something even more sinister at play? It doesn’t matter. The movie’s plot isn’t concerned with closing up loose ends. The movie is more interested in asking than it is with answering. 

I’ve seen Day of Reckoning compared to the work of David Lynch. Usually, when people say “Lynchian” they just mean weird. Here, I think it’s an apt comparison. Day of Reckoning reminds me a lot of Lost Highway, a movie about identity and what makes us who we are. The basic set-up and pay-off is to make us ponder about the nature of self and doesn’t purport to have all the answers. 

Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning are two of the best direct-to-video action sequels ever made. It’s quite possible that they are the best, because I’m at a loss to think of anything yet that’s topped them. Hyams was smart enough to know that the production values would be a big selling point to the movies’ overall quality, but that wasn’t enough. An empty shell with a nice coat of gloss on it is still an empty shell. Both of his movies have a lot to say, but even more to ask. And to wonder.