Universal Soldier (4 Stars)

This is a film I've never felt inclined to watch. I avoid films starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and I'm indifferent to Dolph Lundgren. However, it's the choice for this month's "Best of Cinema" feature, so I turned up at the cinema and bought my ticket. Before the film started, the man sitting next to me was raving about how good the film was, which put me in the mood.

The film begins in Vietnam in 1969. The whole platoon of Luc Devereux has been wiped out. Almost the whole platoon. He finds his sergeant, Andrew Scott, in a hut torturing a family of civilians. "They're all our enemies", he claims. Luc tries to force him to stop, but the sergeant calls him a traitor. They get into a gunfight and they both die. Later their bodies are found, and they're carried away. To avoid any arguments about the circumstances of their deaths they're both declared MIA (Missing In Action).

25 years later the two men are alive. They haven't aged a day. They've been revived by a secret military agency. They have extraordinary strength and healing abilities, but they tend to overheat after being in action and need to be cooled down. Their memories have been erased, and they've been programmed to obey every order without question.

At this point the film seems like a cross between "Robocop" and "Terminator 2".

The erasure of the memories wasn't 100% successful. The two men still have vague recollections of their last experiences before their deaths. Luc is ordered to kill a reporter who's discovered their base. This reminds him of the incident with the Vietnamese villagers, so he rescues the reporter and flees. Sergeant Scott remembers that Luc was a traitor, so he makes it his personal mission to hunt him down.

Is it a "best of cinema" film? I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. There's a lot of action, but no real depth to the characters. Sergeant Scott is the bad Terminator and Luc Devereux is the good Terminator, hunting one another to fight to the death. The chain-smoking reporter Veronica Roberts is annoyingly bland. She's just a rehash of a hundred other film reporters for whom the story is more important than anything else. I liked the film for the action, but the story is too superficial for me to want to watch it again. Next month's "Best of Cinema" film is better. I already know what it is.

Success Rate:  + 2.1

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