I’m sure this isn’t a fair comparison given that one is the most recent installment of a canonical franchise in cinema history and the other is the most recent installment in a franchise whose third film went straight-to-video, but Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning feels a bit like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, mostly because, in both, it feels as if the aging icons of both were woken from their deep slumber, propped up, and pushed onto a sound stage. In the case of Universal Solider, Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude van Damme were given machetes to languidly swing as they hobbled forward.
Day of Reckoning starts in the home of John (Scott Adkins). Woken by his daughter because of monsters in her closet, John investigates. Here, there is a wonky form a first-person shaky camera shooting combined with an effect that makes the camera look like it’s blinking away sleep. The persistent convergence of black shades coming from the top and bottom of the frame is, at first, clever, but shortly thereafter annoying, particularly because of its inconsistency with the events of the scene.
Clearly, there are no monsters in her closet – the black-clad Luc Deveraux and his brood not withstanding. They beat Jean with a pry bar, but his blinking does remains calm. It seems that being struck with iron would cause at least one wince of pain that would force someone to close his yes. No John. What’s more impressive: he’s struck on or about the head six times, yet he barely falls over – according to the first-person camera. And despite the blood that pours from his head onto the mirror in which he looks, there is no blood streaming in or gathering around his eyes.
The film wants to be stylized, but is unsure how to employ and subsequently manage the style that it covets. As John finally falls to the floor, he – still blinking rather calmly – witnesses the killing of his wife and daughter.
Nine months later, John wakes in a private hospital room with a sexy / creepy nurse who seems to have no apparent purpose other than to be sexy and creepy. Immediately after he wakes, an FBI agent enters with a doctor who looks like he received his medical degree through a correspondence course, and the agent prods John with questions: do you remember anything?
After a minor, nine-month coma, clearly John remembers “everything.” So, John is sent to the house where his family was murdered, which clearly still has food in it and hasn’t been foreclosed upon. Here, he gets a creepy phone call that leads to John uncovering a dead body and trying to figure out what sort of “shipment” his creepy friend was calling about.
Or, at least, I think that’s what John’s trying to figure out. Truthfully, the audio in this film is so terrible, and the dialogue so sparse that I didn’t realize Scott Adkins was from Scotland until five minutes left in the movie when he spoke long enough to expose an accent.
Perhaps the lack of dialogue is best here though, considering that, when someone does speak, it’s usually centered around vague statements that probably sounded much more clever in the writers’ heads.
And then there are the randomly weird moments in the film. This film, first and foremost is not for the epileptic and seriously needs a warning prior to it. At various moments that the Day of Reckoning attempts to confuse the audience’s perception of Luc Deveraux (Van Damme) – here it seems that he’s the bad guy – the scene becomes engulfed in strobe lighting…for a while…obnoxiously…and irritatingly. No wonder Deveraux went batshit and began killing people a la Colonel Kurtz.
This leads to someone else rather irritating about Day of Reckoning: it really wants to be the films that it isn’t. There are moments throughout that farcically recall The Shining, The Terminator, and Apocalypse Now, but this is one of those films that exemplifies the gray area between homage and plagiarism, tribute and unoriginality. While the action sequences sans van Damme and Lundgren – so, one action scene – are decently sped up (even though they try to mimic the feel of the Bourne franchise), sliced foots, fingers, flipped trucks, and battling in a sporting goods store hardly makes this film worth a second viewing.
