Surrealist Ultra-Violence and the Beauty of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
The hidden gem of Avant-Garde and action filmmaking
Warning: This will contain some violent & gory content, including clips from the film.
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is an avant-garde action film that finds itself sixth in a series full of retcons, recastings, and recastings of those recastings, sitting in the bottom of a bargain bin of $5 movies. It’s a surrealist puzzle of a plot that has unfortunately been buried with poorly animated animals and 5 feature packs of standup comedy.
If you are unfamiliar with the Universal Soldier series, it starts out with the 1992 film, Universal Soldier, starring the series’ main selling points, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, as part of an experimental group of soldiers brought back from the dead and turned into supersoldiers that take all orders, have no memories, and often overheat and must be cooled. They both play soldiers who died in the Vietnam war; Van Damme as Luc Deveraux and Lundgren as his sergeant, Andrew Scott. The film opens with Scott murdering his own squad and villagers along with cutting off their ears to wear around his neck. After getting in a shootout with each other, both die and are frozen cryogenically to be used for the Universal Soldier program in the near future.
Over the runtime of the film, Van Damme’s character goes from starkly cold to kind of a charismatic guy as shown in a scene where he fights everyone in a restaurant while eating an absurd amount of food that he can’t pay for. Classic Luc Deveraux! At the end of the film, the majority spent following Luc Deveraux fleeing from Andrew Scott, Luc sticks Andrew into a wood chipper where he is spit out into a million chunks and when asked where Andrew is, Luc playfully says “Around”. It’s lighthearted but still has its action.
Enter a couple of retconned movies, some with Deveraux and Scott recast, and one loosely connected to Day of Reckoning called, Universal Soldier: Regeneration where a squad of Universal Soldiers, UniSols to us fans, must take down a group led by Andrew Scott trying to blow up what remains of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor remains only to be foiled by the Universal Soldier brought out of retirement, Luc Deveraux, who spends most of his time in the movie in therapy sessions until he is brought to Chernobyl. This entry in the series marks John Hyams’ entrance as director, who is also part of the writing team of the film along with Jon Greenhalgh and Doug Magnusun.
Fast forward three years later to 2012 and we have Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. The film receives an NC-17 rating due to excessive violence and is cut down to an R-rated version to be released theatrically. Day of Reckoning was released on a total of 3 screens in the United States and mass released in Russia, Malaysia, Ukraine, the UAE, and Turkey. It cost $8 million to make, the box office was $1.4 million. What I would give to be someone who saw this in theaters.
I don’t want to get into the plot of the film too much because I’m not entirely sure that I could explain it to you so I am mostly going to tell you about some other aspects of the film, hopefully not ruining your inevitable watch of it.
So far, this is also the only movie where I have seen Jean-Claude Van Damme playing a villain instead of his usual charismatic hero type which is a switch from the previous entries in the series. It’s not clarified why he’s changed but his mission is to set free all of the UniSols and create a new generation of free UniSols after them.
John Hyam’s marks his influences for the film as Apocalypse Now, The Manchurian Candidate, Chinatown, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Francis Ford Coppola’s influence on the film is out in full force – Jean-Claude Van Damme’s now extra-emotionless Luc Deveraux almost mirrors Marlon Brando’s historic performance as Colonel Kurtz.
Another moment is John’s approach to where the UniSols and Luc Deveraux are headquartered which pulls influence from Apocalypse Now’s which in turn pulls from Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The indirect influence of Herzog is really something beautiful to see in a direct-to-video bloodfest of a film.
It reaches levels of brutal violence and gore in fight sequences I have only seen the likes of in Park Chan-wook films such as Oldboy or Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Fingers get chopped off, feet get chopped off, brains and viscera coat walls and floors after one-sided gunfights. I watched the NC-17 rated version and from what I’ve seen of the R-rated one, it really tames it down. The best fight in the film is by far the battle between Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins’ characters at the end of the movie which ends with Lundgren’s head totally impaled on a machete. At no point does this film hold back with violence.
Throughout the film, we experience these first-person sequences after characters receive unknown injections that feel like some sort of Enter the Void inspired trip involving flashing lights, hallucinations, and hearing heartbeats as we look through the character’s blinking eyes. The film opens up with a terrifying sequence in this style; through the eyes of Scott Adkins’ character, John, we watch him witness the brutal murder of his wife and child. We hear his heart, we see him blink, we are him at this moment. He walks through his house in search of monsters his daughter saw in the kitchen only to discover it was not her imagination but rather a group of three men donned in balaclavas and holding guns.
The clip below is of the opening scene. A quick note, this seems to be the one from the R-rated cut because in the NC-17 version that I viewed, there was a massive amount of blood compared to this.
Perhaps we’re seeing somewhat of a dismantling of the action film genre itself by exposing the motives and reasons behind what characters do what they do being facetious but this also begs the question: who was the target audience for this movie? I know it wasn’t me but I have trouble imagining who this is made for. The average direct-to-video action film enjoyer is not seeking the cerebral experience this film provides and the person looking for a cerebral experience is not looking at their direct-to-video options.
You just need to trust me on this. It’s the sixth in a series of mostly direct-to-video movies but you need to trust me – it is one of the best action movies I have ever seen. It has a complexity and surrealness in it that has no place being in the sixth movie in the Universal Soldier series but is there anyway. Day of Reckoning is closer to Twin Peaks: The Return than any of the other Universal Soldier movies and I hope to see many more action movies approach their story in this surrealist and strange way.