You know a film must be pretty awful when:
a) Burt Reynolds is the best actor in it.
b) You keep wishing Jean-Claude Van Damme would make a re-appearance.
Absolutely dire is a kind way of describing this pitiful offering. The original concept behind the Universal Soldier had plenty of potential, but this sequel to a sequel (and not even real sequels, but TV Movie sequels!) is almost too bad for words.
Each and every one of the actors is truly terrible, especially the leading man, Battaglia. I know he's supposed to be playing a mindless automaton to begin with, but give me a break! Wooden doesn't begin to describe his performance which was so devoid of energy and enthusiasm that I began to long for Jean Claude to return. Now that's pretty bad!
Burt Reynolds is the best of the bunch, but he fails miserably to deliver even a half-way decent Irish accent. At first, I couldn't even figure out what accent he was trying to portray, let alone whether it was any good or not. Please Burt, go back to the retirement home and stop making a fool out of yourself.
The plot is pure silliness, coming from the "straight-to-video action movie" library of crass, "fire-fight for no reason" scripts. Endless gun fights, interspersed with "arty" shots of shell casings falling to the floor a la The Matrix (but never more than about three, almost as if they only had three casings). Lots of automatic gunfire, but the only people that actually get killed appear to be innocent bystanders. The Unisols in this movie appear capable of A-Team like innaccuracy when it comes to hitting the main characters.
<spoilers ahead>
In fact, when it comes to automatic fire, this film did teach me one thing. Ambulances are bullet-proof and perfect for escaping from machine gun toting uber-killers! Despite being hit front and rear, the ambulance received not even a scratch, not one bullet hole or broken window. The same ambulance also proved to be impervious to suicide soldiers who leapt in front of it, again sustaining no damage apart from a few sprinkles of fake blood.
There are a large number of pointless or contrived scenes and heaps of foolish dialogue that falls flat on its face. A number of scenes are just plain risible, such as the scene where the Unisols are "covertly" entering a military airbase. They come up against a chainlink fence and resort to the best means to "covertly" cut through it to gain entry - a frickin blowtorch! No pansy boltcutters or wire-snips here. A full on blowtorch to melt through the links. Yep, the guards'll never notice a blowtorch in the pitch darkness! Duh! Pure idiocy.
Later, inconsistent scenes and dialogue appear, such as the bomb in the hero's brother's chest, which we are told has a blast radius of twenty yards. When it goes off (moments later) it's more like he had a firecracker under his shirt. No, I take that back. A firecracker would have been more dangerous. Pathetic film-making! Then there's the scene with Burt leaping to his death from a rooftop onto the roof of a car. All the windows except for the windscreen itself blew out, but the screen wasn't even cracked? C'mon! I know it's only a TV Movie, but how dumb do they think the audience really is?
All in all, this movie is not worth watching except perhaps as an exercise in how not to make an action movie. There's really no excuse for thinking that this kind of rubbish will satisfy even the most easily pleased of movie-goers. I know TV Movies have a very limited budget, but this takes the p**s. If they could afford Burt Reynolds, they could have afforded a few old cars to smash up or even an old van they could have painted up like an ambulance so they could have put bulletholes in it, for Chrissake!
The Director appears to have only worked in television, directing odd episodes of this series or that, and the small screen mentality really shows in this movie. But it's the plot that really is beyond poor. An average six year old could probably come up with a more interesting and gripping action script than this one.
If you are a fan of the original, give this a very wide berth, or it'll scar you for life.
a) Burt Reynolds is the best actor in it.
b) You keep wishing Jean-Claude Van Damme would make a re-appearance.
Absolutely dire is a kind way of describing this pitiful offering. The original concept behind the Universal Soldier had plenty of potential, but this sequel to a sequel (and not even real sequels, but TV Movie sequels!) is almost too bad for words.
Each and every one of the actors is truly terrible, especially the leading man, Battaglia. I know he's supposed to be playing a mindless automaton to begin with, but give me a break! Wooden doesn't begin to describe his performance which was so devoid of energy and enthusiasm that I began to long for Jean Claude to return. Now that's pretty bad!
Burt Reynolds is the best of the bunch, but he fails miserably to deliver even a half-way decent Irish accent. At first, I couldn't even figure out what accent he was trying to portray, let alone whether it was any good or not. Please Burt, go back to the retirement home and stop making a fool out of yourself.
The plot is pure silliness, coming from the "straight-to-video action movie" library of crass, "fire-fight for no reason" scripts. Endless gun fights, interspersed with "arty" shots of shell casings falling to the floor a la The Matrix (but never more than about three, almost as if they only had three casings). Lots of automatic gunfire, but the only people that actually get killed appear to be innocent bystanders. The Unisols in this movie appear capable of A-Team like innaccuracy when it comes to hitting the main characters.
<spoilers ahead>
In fact, when it comes to automatic fire, this film did teach me one thing. Ambulances are bullet-proof and perfect for escaping from machine gun toting uber-killers! Despite being hit front and rear, the ambulance received not even a scratch, not one bullet hole or broken window. The same ambulance also proved to be impervious to suicide soldiers who leapt in front of it, again sustaining no damage apart from a few sprinkles of fake blood.
There are a large number of pointless or contrived scenes and heaps of foolish dialogue that falls flat on its face. A number of scenes are just plain risible, such as the scene where the Unisols are "covertly" entering a military airbase. They come up against a chainlink fence and resort to the best means to "covertly" cut through it to gain entry - a frickin blowtorch! No pansy boltcutters or wire-snips here. A full on blowtorch to melt through the links. Yep, the guards'll never notice a blowtorch in the pitch darkness! Duh! Pure idiocy.
Later, inconsistent scenes and dialogue appear, such as the bomb in the hero's brother's chest, which we are told has a blast radius of twenty yards. When it goes off (moments later) it's more like he had a firecracker under his shirt. No, I take that back. A firecracker would have been more dangerous. Pathetic film-making! Then there's the scene with Burt leaping to his death from a rooftop onto the roof of a car. All the windows except for the windscreen itself blew out, but the screen wasn't even cracked? C'mon! I know it's only a TV Movie, but how dumb do they think the audience really is?
All in all, this movie is not worth watching except perhaps as an exercise in how not to make an action movie. There's really no excuse for thinking that this kind of rubbish will satisfy even the most easily pleased of movie-goers. I know TV Movies have a very limited budget, but this takes the p**s. If they could afford Burt Reynolds, they could have afforded a few old cars to smash up or even an old van they could have painted up like an ambulance so they could have put bulletholes in it, for Chrissake!
The Director appears to have only worked in television, directing odd episodes of this series or that, and the small screen mentality really shows in this movie. But it's the plot that really is beyond poor. An average six year old could probably come up with a more interesting and gripping action script than this one.
If you are a fan of the original, give this a very wide berth, or it'll scar you for life.