UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING

Stars: Scott Adkins, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Andrei Arlovski, Mariah Bonner, Tony Jareau, Craig Walker and Andrew Sikking.
Writers: John Hyams, Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenhalgh.
Director: John Hyams.

Rating: 3.5/5

There is not a solitary reason why audiences should expect a shred of fresh creativity by the fourth instalment of any film franchise, let alone the anachronistic blood’n’guts muscle-man/headed Universal Soldier series.

The story of the half-man/half-cyborg fighting unit seemed like a big deal when then-bankable stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren kicked off the ‘UniSol’ adventures in Roland Emmerich’s 1992 original (backed by major players Carolco and Columbia Tri-Star Pictures). However, subsequent sequels (two officially, though the brand has been exploited in various guises) were mindless, ‘base element’ knock-offs that relegated the franchise to straight-to-video obscurity.

The director of sequel #2, Regeneration, John Hyams, returns for Day of Reckoning with an entirely fresh perspective on UniSol lore. Son of journeyman genre filmmaker Peter Hyams (2010, Timecop, Capricorn One, Outland), he centres his narrative on Scott Adkins’ John, a broad-shouldered ex-military man who plunges into a coma after having been beaten senseless and forced to witness the slaying of his wife and daughter; the first-person perspective of these opening scenes set the tone for what will be a gruelling, viscerally immersive experience.

The killer is Luc Devereaux (a Kurtz-like Van Damme, complete with shining, hairless dome and mumbly drawl), who soon becomes the vengeful target of John when he awakens 9 months later (his rebirth, as it were). But John is as much Devereaux’s target; surviving UniSol’s are being corralled and controlled in a cult-like underground lair by Devereaux and his 2IC, Andrew Scott (Lundgren, offering up a wild, wide-eyed take on dark-souled evangelistic fervour in his two key scenes).

Hyams’ film is steeped in the myopic lust for vengeance that fuels many B-actioners, but he brings a great deal more to the proceedings. Strobe-lit visions of Devereaux haunt John, pulsating nightmares that are accompanied by an ambient soundscape more in tune with the works of Gaspar Noe (Enter the Void) or Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow). Hyams’ stages expository dialogue with sparse, precise intensity; one character-defining exchange between John and stripper-with-a-secret Sarah (a striking Mariah Bonner) is lit with dark, Lynch-ian reds and blues and played with paranoid, Cronenberg-like intensity. British-born kickboxing champ Adkins’ is no De Niro, but he handles bottled rage and dawning realisation with enough skill to make John’s plight entirely engaging.

And if all these references are lost on the aging fan returning to a favoured franchise from their youth, there is more than enough corporeal action to sate even the most demanding connoisseur. This is a low-budget work but Hyams makes every cent count; a thrilling car chase and the final, extended subterranean stand-off between John, and Devereaux’s brain-washed UniSol army are expertly shot. A blood-soaked sports-store dust-up between John and a mindless assassin known as The Plumber (Andrei Arkovski) is a brutal classic of its type.