Film Review: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992, Roland Emmerich)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 102  minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Jean-Claude Van Damme (BLOODSPORT, KICKBOXER), Dolph Lundgren (MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, ROCKY IV), Ally Walker (SONS OF ANARCHY, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING), Jerry Orbach (LAW AND ORDER, DIRTY DANCING), Leon Rippy (STARGATE, THE PATRIOT), Rance Howard (Ron's dad, FORCED TO KILL, CHINATOWN), Ed O'Ross (LETHAL WEAPON, RED HEAT), Eric Norris (son of Chuck, DELTA FORCE, TOP DOG), Tiny Lister (EXTREME PREJUDICE, JACKIE BROWN), Michael Jai White (SPAWN,  BLACK DYNAMITE).  Music by Christopher Franke (member of Tangerine Dream, MCBAIN, THE TOMMYKNOCKERS).
Tag-line: "The ultimate weapons of the future have just declared war... on each other."
Best one-liner:  "Say goodnight, asshole!"  –"Good night, asshole!"

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER.  Oh yeah.  This is probably the movie that should have been called CYBORG.  For starters, it's actually about cyborgs, unlike CYBORG, which is actually about post-apocalyptic fashion-conscious nomads who happen to be named after popular guitar brands.  But let me get back to UNIVERSAL SOLDIER.  We've got Van Damme as 'Luc Deveraux,' an ambiguously Belgian-American soldier who died in Vietnam while fighting his mortal enemy Dolph Lundgren (as 'Andrew Scott,' an ambiguously Swedish-American soldier.)  Then, their bodies are reanimated and turned into cyborgs by Jerry Orbach, and then they continue to fight each other, all the way to the Grand Canyon.  Toss in an endless bunch of TERMINATOR homages (and rip-off elements), an obligatory truck vs. bus chase, a grocery store shoot out:

 a blown up gas station:

 Technically, it's not an action movie unless they blow up a rustic, Southwestern gas station.

and that's pretty much the movie.  But what a movie it is.  I mean, it came from the minds who made THE HITCHHIKER– what do you expect?  (Note that I said THE HITCHHIKER, not THE HITCHER.)  As I often say, it's the little things that make a movie special, and I'm about to name a few of them.

Where to begin– well, let's see... how about the fact that Dolph Lundgren's sole character motivation seems to be the desire to make human ear-necklaces, and then make groan-inducing puns about them.


In fact, maybe this movie should have been entitled EAR AND LOATHING IN THE GRAND CANYON or THE SWEET EARAFTER or something, because I'm starting to think that UNIVERSAL SOLDIER is too classy a name for this thing.  I mean, it's presumably purloined from a 1960s Canadian folk rock song.  Eh, no matter.

Anyway, Dolph runs rampant across the greater American Southwest, trying to hunt down Van Damme and delivering soliloquies such as "Well, I'm fighting this thing man, it's like kick ass or kiss ass, and I'm busting heads!"

He steals rednecks' belts,

and at one point, a dummy of Dolph flies through the front windshield of a car, prompting the one-liner, "He should have buckled up."

Above all, Dolph realizes what movie he is in, and he's having a hell of a lot of fun with it.  He's given more to do than, say, in ROCKY IV, and he knows that the line "Now where are we gonna shoot her?  In the stomach?  Naaah.  In the chest?  Noooo...  I think... we... should shoot her... IN THE HEAD!" is ridiculous.  I mean, the man was a chemical engineering Fulbright scholar.  So he does his cartoonish best.  I only mention this, because on the opposite side of the coin is a man who's taking this material seriously.  Very seriously.  And that is the subtle majesty of Jean-Claude Van Damme.



Oh, no!

Van Damme is an Actor, with a capital A.  Don't believe me?  I offer proof:


Sometimes Acting requires a long, lingering shot of Van Damme's ass cheeks.

 The immediate aftermath of a long, lingering shot of Van Damme's ass cheeks.

Sometimes Acting requires a plot point that Van Damme must get naked and cover himself in ice every two hours.

 Insert one of Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze one-liners here.

And sometimes Acting requires THIS, the context and precise nature of which I shall refuse to explain:

 Make sure nobody gets poked in the eye or anything?

I love how almost every JCVD film feels that, despite whatever other mind-boggling suspensions of disbelief are in play, his accent must be addressed.

Later, he's revealed to have vaguely Cajun heritage.  Also, his dad is Rance Howard.  Which, I think makes him Clint Howard's brother.  But I digress.

There's also a wonderful plot element that means JCVD's cyborg-self is always hungry.  This leads to him eating an entire diner's worth of food, which, when he has no money to pay for the feast, leads to a brawl with the chef and several patrons, and some lunch-related one-liners are thrown in there, too.

After kick-blasting everyone into submission, he gets his hands on a complimentary plastic basket of bar popcorn, and the look on his face may very well be the purest distillation of "childish happiness" ever captured on film, at least since Michael Jackson got to live out his "claymation duets and giant transforming robot saving the world" fantasies in MOONWALKER. I mean, look at him:

How could you not be charmed by that kiddie-level sincerity?  Awwww, allllllright– Give him the popcorn, says the audience.  Give him ALL the popcorn.  He earned it.  (Ask me later about my conspiracy theory that JCVD was paid for his role in this film exclusively in popcorn.)

Anyway, it all leads to a final, ridiculous martial arts duel that ends with one of our two combatants suffering a Lucio Fulci-style impalement and then being SHREDDED TO DEATH BY A HAY BALER.  If that's not worth four stars, I'm not quite sure what is.  

Thanks for everything, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER.  Four stars.

-Sean Gill

Also, many further thanks to the wondrous featurette on the DVD called "A Tale of Two Titans," which features interviews with Dolph and JCVD, ridiculous low-budget re-enactment cutaways of everything they're talking about, JCVD doing a Menahem Golan impersonation, Dolph plugging his new production company "Thor Pictures," and the following archival photos of them as youngsters!

Read More

Film Review: HOMER AND EDDIE (1989, Andrei Konchalovsky)

Stars: 2.2 of 5.
Running Time: 102 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: James Belushi, Whoopi Goldberg, John Waters (director of PINK FLAMINGOS and SERIAL MOM), Anne Ramsey (THE GOONIES, DEADLY FRIEND), Mickey Jones (TOTAL RECALL, EXTREME PREJUDICE), Karen Black (FIVE EASY PIECES, INVADERS FROM MARS), Vincent Schiavelli (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, LORD OF ILLUSIONS), Tracey Walter (REPO MAN, MORTUARY ACADEMY), 'Tiny' Lister (EXTREME PREJUDICE, JACKIE BROWN), Pruitt Taylor Vince (NATURAL BORN KILLERS, WILD AT HEART), Wayne Grace (DANCES WITH WOLVES, MULHOLLAND DR.), Robert Glaudini (CUTTING CLASS; GRUNT! THE WRESTLING MOVIE).
Tag-line: "She's ruthless - He's witless - They're on the road together and falling apart at the seams!"
Best one-liner: "What the fuck is a brain stem?"

Sometimes when I can't tell if a film is supposed to be a comedy or a drama, and James Belushi happens to be in it, all I have to do is look at his credit: if it says 'Jim' (SNOW DOGS, CANADIAN BACON, ABRAXIS: GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE, JUMPIN' JACK FLASH) it's probably intended to be a comedy, and if it says 'James' (SALVADOR, WILD PALMS, THIEF), it probably means that he wants to be taken seriously. HOMER AND EDDIE is a film which pendulates wildly between the full on-whacky and the quasi-profound, but for the record, he's credited as 'James.'

A lot of 70's and 80's movies struggle to maintain a consistent tone (INTO THE NIGHT, THE END, FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, SOMETHING WILD, HOWARD THE DUCK, and STROKER ACE come to mind), establishing themselves as Zany with a capital Z, and then pulling the rug out with something that's Heavy with a capital H. It's not to say that this will derail an entire film, or that tonal shifts can't be done well (see the Coens, David Lynch, et al.), but it's possible that two disparate tones have never been quite so at odds with one another as is the case in HOMER AND EDDIE. For example, we follow up a disquieting scene with a terminally ill woman smashing her head into a bathroom mirror...

...with one that involves hootin' n' hollerin' whilst driving past a bus full of nubile cheerleaders while set to peppy 80' grooves. A serious theological discussion that ends with Whoopi screaming, in all seriousness, "THERE AIN'T NO FUCKING GOD!" is followed by a fix-em-up montage set to tender guitar and wailin', sultry saxophone.

Directed by the writer of IVAN'S CHILDHOOD and ANDREI RUBLEV (!) and Cannon Films director-in-residence (RUNAWAY TRAIN, MARIA'S LOVERS, SHY PEOPLE) Andrei Konchalovsky, HOMER AND EDDIE is the tale of a brain-damaged man-child (James Belushi) and a brain-tumored sociopath (Whoopi Goldberg) who join forces and go on a West Coast road trip in search of the meaning of life, the meaning of family, and a missing eighty-seven dollars.

In short, it's a coming of age drama, a zany buddy-trip flick, an on-the-lam crime thriller, a fish out of water story, a Depression-era throwback (that's kind of a 1980's OF MICE AND MEN), a sex farce, and a cult movie. It's like somebody thought that combining RAIN MAN, SOMETHING WILD, and PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE would in some way be a good idea.
[The only movies of the era I can think of which can properly pull off the Americana road trip scenario along with flashes of beauty and violence and comedy and pathos are Jim Jarmusch's MYSTERY TRAIN and David Lynch's WILD AT HEART.]

Our leads do a pretty good job of 'running it up the flagpole,' so to speak. Belushi tries his hardest to pull off 'lovable, mentally disabled man.' The fact that I didn't find it entirely offensive is a tremendous credit to Belushi's acting chops.

I became something of a latter-day Whoopi fan only after seeing her performance in FATAL BEAUTY, and she's pretty amusing here, rampaging about and robbing people and uttering rejoinders such as "You're like Frankenstein and shit!" She anchors the erratic and ridiculous character with enough humanity that I was never actively pissed at her, and again, that is something of an achievement. You know a film is not hitting it's mark when I have to compliment it in terms 'what was not actively aggravating me.'

When you'd fear that all hope is lost- in a twist that really blew my mind– there's a goddamned parade of iconic cult actors in bit parts. Just look at this rogue's gallery:

Michael Ironside's best bud and ex-Bob-Dylan-drummer Mickey Jones as a redneck manhandled by Whoopi in a diner:


Legendary melancholy-faced character actor Vincent Schiavelli as a priest who refuses to grant Whoopi absolution for murder:


Former wrestler and action film standby Tommy 'Tiny' Lister as a heat-packin' clubgoer begrudingly won over by Belushi's cutesyness:


Crabby acting icon Anne Ramsey as a grizzled convenience store owner keeping an eagle eye out for shoplifters:


70's giant Karen Black as the insane madam of a low-rent, Southwestern, tin-shed whorehouse:


Pruitt Taylor Vince as an unlucky liquor store owner:


Director John Waters as a thieving, flaming highwayman who declares "Move it, maggot!":


And cult actor extraordinaire Tracey Walter as a stuttering cop and boyhood friend of Belushi.


Whew! In closing, I still like Konchalovsky. RUNAWAY TRAIN remains an all-time favorite, and HOMER AND EDDIE is by no means a terrible film, it's merely a misguided one. Probably the most inspired bit of work done on the film is by sometime Golan-Globus and Full Moon Pictures casting director Robert MacDonald (BARFLY, MURPHY'S LAW, RUNAWAY TRAIN, AMERICAN NINJA, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, SUBSPECIES, CASTLE FREAK, TRANCERS II) who assembled enough eclectic performers and bizarro cameos to really keep things interesting, even if it was something along the lines of 'What notorious cult performer will pop up next?!'

For its status as a (misconceived) labor of love and a treasure trove of unexpected personalities: a little over two stars.

-Sean Gill

Read More