Review by:
Matt Lynch

About half an hour into Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a character gets jabbed in the neck with some sort of syringe and the screen begins to strobe so quickly and brightly you may need to cover your eyes. After a minute or so of this, you start to realize that the silhouette slightly resembling a giant peanut is gradually revealing itself to be the strangely misshapen head of action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, glaring at you from who knows where. Welcome to the cult.

For the uninitiated, the Universal Soldier series—starting with the Roland Emmerich film of that name from 1992—centers on a covert government program to produce unstoppable genetically engineered super soldiers. But director John Hyams is resolutely uninterested in making a typical genre piece. Hyams signals his subversive ambitions right in the opening scene of Day of Reckoning, as we see the nominal hero of this franchise, Van Damme’s Luc Deveraux, ruthlessly slaughter the wife and daughter of this new film’s protagonist, John (Scott Adkins). After nine comatose months, John sets out for revenge.

What follows is less a straight action movie than a reversal on the classic Wrong Man scenario as John becomes increasingly aware that he is not who he thinks he is. There’s a nifty twist on an old trope, for instance, wherein John tries to get information out of a badly scarred tough guy only to realize that he put those scars there in the first place. Everyone in Day of Reckoning, in fact, is forced to come to grips with the existential nightmare that comes with being a vat-grown, government-owned killing machine with no agency and no memories. If James Bond, Jason Bourne and other such characters could be described as human weapons who realize they don't want to be weapons anymore, Day of Reckoning focuses on human weapons who discover they may never have been human to begin with.

As co-star Dolph Lundgren intones at one point to his fellow clone-troopers, “Our thoughts interrupted by unfamiliar forces, we are merely arms and legs”—and, as if in response to that declaration, the film itself becomes increasingly expressionistic in its visual style. In addition to the aforementioned strobes, Hyams deploys framing and lighting setups that wouldn’t be out of place in film noir, with dark hotel rooms illuminated by a single swinging lamp or by a police car’s red and blue lights cut into shards by Venetian blinds. Day of Reckoning drives the noir-ish style home by paying tribute to Hyams’s cinematic forbears. Van Damme’s death-cult-invitational visage suggests a variant on Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse; a freakout tracking-shot point-of-view sequence—in which Hyams’s camera snakes through underground catacombs in search of a hidden stronghold of rebellious UniSols—brings to mind not only David Lynch with its droning soundtrack and constant diving into shadows, but also Louis Feuillade with its Les Vampires-like cadre of criminals and their cumulative psychosocial distress.

As imaginatively shot and plotted as it is, Day of Reckoning hardly stints on the action-movie thrills we expect. Hyams delivers one shockingly brutal sequence after another as these nearly unstoppable monsters tear their worlds apart while attempting to tear each other apart. John’s fight with his foe Magnus (MMA fighter Andrei “The Pit Bull” Arlovski)—in which they level a sporting-goods store while tussling—is a punishing sequence full of aluminum baseball bats glancing off elbows, walls ripped apart and glass shattering. Frequently sticking to medium shots and long takes, Hyams usually places his combatants at oblique angles on opposite ends of the frame and lets fly, relying on inventive choreography and the athletic skill of his performers to provide the fireworks, in the manner of many classic martial-arts films (it helps that Adkins and many of the actors are trained martial artists).

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is the kind of low-budget surprise that argues for the de-ghettoization of the action film. The film’s more stylized elements are hardly a mere pretense to dress up a clichéd genre yarn; Hyams—as he did in his previous Universal Soldier installment, Regeneration (2009)—evinces a bizarre empathy for these mostly inhuman characters. Like its characters, Day of Reckoning valiantly struggles to be something more than just a violent machine—and, more often than not, it succeeds brilliantly.