Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning

 Jean-Claude Van Damme has always played the hero in the Universal Soldier series, but in this installment that wasn’t the case.

   In the fourth installment of the series directed by John Hyams (“Universal Soldier 3 Regeneration”) our hero is John played by Scott Adkins. Action fans may remember Adkins best for playing the hard hitting prison fighter, Yuri Boyka, in “Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing.”  In this movie John awakens from a coma with not much memory except for his family being killed by armed assailants lead by Luke Deveraux (Van Damm). John then swears vengeance on Deveraux and put the pieces of his shattered life back together. This journey pits John against Andrew Scott, portrayed by Dolph Lundgren, (“The Expendables 2”) and an army of UniSol’s  lead by Deveraux who wants to make a new world order lead by the UniSol’s.

   This wasn’t the greatest movie for the Universal Soldier series. It had a hard to follow story line, too many government conspiracies, and not enough of Van Damme or Lundgren. This is one of those movies where you have to watch or rewind it multiple times to understand what’s going on.  What makes up for this film however, is the action sequences between all the main characters and co-star Andrei “The Pitbull” Arlovski from the UFC (“Ultimate Fighting Championship”.) 

    In the last three installments we see Deveraux as the hero and never the bad guy which threw me off as I watched this film. Van Damme portrays this character differently than in the previous versions of this series. We see a much colder and more evil version of the once so called hero. Deveraux goal is to take in and free the soldier’s from the government’s control with the help of his second in command Scott. In the previous installments Deveraux and Scott are mortal enemies ever since they killed each other in Vietnam and then brought back to life in a government experiment. They became the first Universal Soldiers  Seeing that they were working together really surprised me because usually they are pitted against each other for a final fight scene.

   We barely see Van Damme throughout the film which is a big disappointment for Van Damme and “Universal Soldier” fans. He had maybe a couple of pages of lines and probably used the same line more than once. When we see Scott inject another UniSol with a serum that kills the government microchip implanted in their necks, they begin to see images of Scott and Deveraux saying, “We are brothers, we are one.”

  Lundgren also had the same problem as Van Damm with very few lines during the film but he o makes up for it with an epic speech to his army about the Day of Reckoning when the UniSol’s will take over the world.

   Despite the lack of lines, ther fight scenes with upcoming action star Adkins were still epic. Once Adkins found the hidden base of the UniSol’s he becomes a one man army killing everything in his wake. Once he found Deveraux the two became entwined in a struggle to the death, with hard hitting and blood spattering proportions.

   In the end this blogger gives “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning 6 out of 10. If Adkins and Van Damm would have exchanged roles from hero and villain maybe this installment of the series would have been better.