When Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character says, “There is no end,” you’d be forgiven for thinking he could be referring to the Universal Soldier franchise, which numbers either four or six with the arrival of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, depending on which nerd you ask. No end is necessary if the sequels were to stay at this entry’s level of quality — a tall order, to be sure, as director/co-writer John Hyams (2009’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration) has made a valiant attempt at a serious action film that also kicks serious ass, and mostly succeeds.
Roland Emmerich’s 1992 original pitted genetically re-engineered supersoldiers played by Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren against one another. Here, they reprise their roles as Luc Deveraux and Andrew Scott, respectively, in what amounts to extended cameos, yet never share the screen. Instead, the story is dominated by their ever-nimble Expendables 2 castmate Scott Adkins as John, a family man who is brutally beaten and whose wife and daughter are killed by Deveraux in the film’s home-invasion opening, shot in an inventive manner that suggests this will not be your ordinary Universal Soldier movie. (It won’t. For starters, it’s way more violent. For another, it may give you epilepsy.)
Nine months later, John awakes from his coma and tries to piece together the tattered strands of his life — not an easy task when a sleeper-agent soldier in plumber disguise (UFC fighter Andrei Arlovski) is activated to kill you. (Their post-car-chase tussle in a sporting goods store proves a highlight.) Meanwhile, Deveraux leads an underground movement to “free” these soldiers of their government-implanted memories. That’s a rather dull-sounding subplot, which could be why Hyams has cooked it up in a weirdo marinade flavored with liberal scrubs of The Manchurian Candidate, Apocalypse Now and that one time you “accidentally” licked a toad.
A paranoiac’s dream, Day of Reckoning is not what you’d expect from a late-in-life chapter of a series the greater Western world doesn’t know is still kicking; there’s a lot more going on here. Nearly hallucinatory enough to qualify as a Jacob’s Ladder exercise in horror, and clue-ridden enough to pass as a twisty mystery, it’s a higher-minded effort with a high body count and more long-term cult potential than any of its big brothers. —Rod Lott