Super Soldier Shenanigans: Universal Soldier Day of Reckoning (Part Two)

The upcoming car chase is really the defining moment for how far this movie falls below its predecessor. Universal Soldier: Regeneration begins with a high speed chase through a major city while the Next Generation Unisol kills dozens of bodyguards and police in their path. It establishes how unstoppable the NGU is, it gives as an idea of what to expect from the movie and is a good chase scene on top of it. How does the chase scene in Day of Reckoning compare?

The thrilling battle of Plumbing Work Truck vs 1995 Ford Explorer!

A chase scene between two old fords through the outskirts of Baton Rouge. Are you excited yet? Because I certainly am! To the movies credit, the chase scene is extremely proficient from a technical standpoint, its just so conceptually dull. This isn't evocative of a battle between two super soldiers, it looks like random road rage caught on film. Hell, maybe someone just sideswiped Arlovski while he was driving the plumbing truck and they raced after him to get it all on film?

"OH MY GOD SOMEONE CALL AN AMBULANCE!"
"Hahaha, cut! That was perfect, now lets bail before the cops get here!"

After the two vehicles crash, Magnus throws John into a sporting goods store and the movie teases us by delivering an actually great fight scene between them. The fight scenes for UniSols can often be described as "glacial" but they turn that convention on its head, probably due to Scott Adkins having a kick so fast it changes the weather in China. The fight generally goes for Magnus at the start, with John being overpowered by Magnus until he just randomly realizes he's a Unisol.

"Wait a tic, I'm not disabled: I'm a post human killing machine!"

This revelation completely turns the course of the battle, as he's suddenly physically superior to Magnus in every respect. Again, its actually a good fight that plays up how strong and fast these guys are as they start beating on each other with bats and 50lb weights. John brutally beats down Magnus the UniSol Plumber then executes him with a aluminum bat.

Good night sweet Plumber, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. 

After Magnus gets knocked out of the park, John stops to reflect for a moment on the complexities of life. Well, he only contemplates that his fingers have all fully regrown as good as new but he somehow didn't notice till now. Which begs the question of course, of you know, how the fuck did he not notice that?

"Oh...there they are!"

Ignoring the raging impossibility of that, he gets infuriated at the revelation that he's a super soldier and tears a sink off the wall and throws it. And that's it. Just like absolutely every other revelation that is revealed to him though, he forgets about it 30 seconds later. The guy is like a plot point goldfish, moving forward without a seconds reflection at anything he has learned about himself thus far. How ridiculous a revelation can this guy just blasé his way past?

"Wait, there are two of us? Shit, we're in a Van Damme movie aren't we?"

Yes, when he gets to the cabin, he finds out another version of himself. This is the one that killed Isaac, messed up the mob boss and works for Deveraux. He laments though that he realized that Deveraux was not freeing him from slavery, just exchanging one master for another. He also tells John that he has a tracking chip in the back of his head and that Deveraux is up river.

And then our John kills the original  John and he's never talked about again

This is really the fundamental plotting problem with the movie. Lets ignore the character inconsistencies because lets face it, the series has the continuity of a choose your own adventure story with mislabeled pages. No, the main problem is that there is absolutely no point to this entire plot line.. This is a movie about a man who finds out that everything he knows about himself is false, but there is never a moment of realization of his true self. He seems to flat out ignore every single piece of information he acquires, instead opting to blindly proceed forward.

"Arlovski get more development despite no lines"

You could replace every plot point in this movie with a carrot on a stick and it wouldn't change anything. This is a series with government kill bots so prone to introspection, that asking them if they contemplate the complexities of life is a standard diagnostic test. Jean Claude Van Damme has done more with these elements and he's generally only capable of playing himself in his movies with the exception of the ones in which he plays two Van Dammes.

He did this five times. FIVE!

You could argue that its just a direct to video movie so why bother with a decent script? You could also argue that chickens should be required to wear pants and it would be about as correct. Low budget movies can for better or worse be way more creative than blockbuster movies. If I'm making a movie that costs $200m, there is going to be a bunch of uptight men in suits who want me to play it safe. If I make a movie that only costs $10m, I can swing for the fucking fences with either creative directing or bold ideas.

Do you read Sutter Cane?

At this point in the movie, it becomes obvious what the creative process in the movie was. They sat down to write this movie and someone pitched "Total Recall meets Apocalypse Now meets The Sixth Day" and everyone was too busy high fiving each other over their creativity to realize they should have just made a straight Universal Soldier movie.  Deveraux becomes Colt Kurtz, Scott becomes the Photojournalist and John is an extremely boring Willard/Quaid/Whatever the fuck his name was in 6th Day. You can easily start to see this as John has the tracking device removed from his neck and kicks Phantasia out of the movie. He wanders around the "jungles" of Louisiana until he gets picked up by boat that will take him "Up the river" to see Deveraux.

"I wanted a leading role and for my sins they gave me one"

He arrives at a hole in the ground bunker and gets escorted to the doctor in charge of the UniSols and who is obviously supposed to be the doctor from the previous movie despite him getting an impromptu eye exam courtesy of Sgt Scott's thumbs in the last movie. He tells John that the equipment he was supposed to bring to them was the missing tech required to mass produce UniSols...from their bunker in Louisiana. I know some people are upset about that whole "War of Northern Aggression" thing still but this is taking things too far guys! He then starts operating on John to stop his pain by removing his memories.

Literally. 

He actually uses a drill press on John's skull, then proceeds to reach in with a pair of forceps to yank the memories out of John's head. This is a thing that happens in the movie. He goes knuckle deep while John starts to have all his implanted memories flash before his eyes. The memories get stuck inside Johns head though and the doctor is unable to pull them out.

Again, literally.

John snaps when he feels the guy tugging at his cherished fake memories and breaks free of his restraints and just starts to kill everyone. Does this make any sense from any kind of plot perspective? Absolutely not. Is the scene completely fucking awesome? Hell yeah it is. The movie utterly shines when it drops its retarded plot and just starts shooting dicks off and kicking faces in. Its like the movie remembered it was an action movie and not a drama.

You should have been doing this a god damn hour ago. 

John kills all the grunt UniSols in the directors signature faux oner style and its honestly a great action scene. Its dynamic, its creative, its the directors core competency. This is a guy who knows how to do action scenes and decided to do as few of them as possible, with only a total of probably 25 minutes of action in a two hour movie. Its like Usain Bolt dropping running and taking up curling: What the hell are you even thinking?

Arlovski killed more people in the opening of Regeneration than die in this entire movie. 

After easily dispatching the regular UniSols, John fights Sgt Scott in the armory. Again, its a great scene because the director understands low budget action. Scott is actually the incredibly hard to kill juggernaut he is supposed to be and the scene is dynamic as hell, with the two of them grabbing weapons off the shelves lots of melee gun-fighting between the two as John shoots, stabs, impales, shoots again and machete's Scott.

THIS IS THE WAY A REAL UNISOL DIES

From here, John proceeds to an odd chapel where he confronts Deveraux, who wants to know just what the fuck John's deal is. John tells him that he killed his family, to which Deveraux points out that not only did he not kill them, they're not even real but John refuses to accept this explanation.

I want an explanation of why the hell he did this. 

This starts easily the best fight in the movie as Deveraux and John actually act like super soldiers and hack each other to pieces. The centerpiece of this fight is a machete that the two of them battle for control over, up to and including using their own bodies to block their opponents strikes with it. After a great deal of back and forth between the two, John gets the upper hand and kills Deveraux after he gives John the generic "You'll only know war if you kill me" speech.

Its not an effective tactic to use against a worshipper of  Khorne

Wrapping things up: John finds out he has control over the remaining UniSols...somehow and he meets up with Agent Gorman who we find out is also a Unisol because the movie wants to throw in as many final act plot twists as it can. He gives yet another info dump about how John is special because he has such strong memories and then immediately tells him they're going to wipe those memories. Predictably John doesn't take that very well. 

Not one bit. 

And then another Agent Gorman steps out of the van, heads over to the dead Gormans car then just stares at John for a while before driving away. And then the movie ends with them driving the blood soaked van away while John turns on the windshield wipers. And that's it. That is the ending of this whole mess. Nothing is resolved and the twist is so awkwardly jammed in it might as well be them flipping through a series of hastily scrawled cue cards. What kind of incompetent writer thinks that an utter non sequitur is a good ending for something?

Fuck it, right?