Avis des critiques

The effect is a bit like when a cool indie band slathers a pop song in a thick layer of noise and distortion; something perceived as frivolous or facile is newly coded in one gesture as palatable to a more serious audience. This, it probably goes without saying, warrants a great deal of skepticism.

So non sequitur–prone and reliant on extratextual material that parts might be mistaken for the work of Richard Kelly (Southland Tales), the movie makes no pretense of hanging together. The best bit, a masterfully staged beat-down at a sporting-goods store, arrives at the midpoint. But stick around for a scene of nonconsensual neurosurgery, further long-take ass-kicking and an extended Apocalypse Now homage featuring original Soldierstar Jean-Claude Van Damme in full Brando regalia.

Some of the inner-mind devices are frenetically dramatic and visually overwrought, but they have the merit of their arena-amp intensity, as if suggesting (accurately, I think) that even the most vigorous, violent, outer-directed action is paired with an equally ferocious, deep, and powerful emotional affect.

Hyams' new film is an ambitious radical departure—a ballsy, heady genre mutant that confirms that Hyams is something more than just a smart and talented action traditionalist. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning grafts an art-horror movie on to the rootstock of a violent action flick. It bears only a passing resemblance to Regeneration, and has even less in common with the original Universal Soldier (1992); in fact, the two films it brings to mind are Lost Highway and Videodrome.

The director is John Hyams, the man behind After Dark Action's "Dragon Eyes." He too advances, generating a feverish ferocity on a minimal budget. If only his script (written with others) were more thought-provoking. Nevertheless, this bloody wallow in sweat, guns and fisticuffs — for those who swing that way — delivers.

The melee fight scenes are seemingly conjured into this dark, poo-encrusted world from some other, happier film containing sunshine and magic, in which muscley men grapple and put one another's heads through walls. Against the prevailing cheerlessness, these intensively choreographed fights, many shot in audacious, roving single takes, are like glimpses into a dream world.

For the sixth entry in a formerly moribund direct-to-video cyborg franchise, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is a remarkably ambitious movie. Wrestling with the malleable nature of identity in between ingeniously choreographed brawls, it's both a head trip and an adrenaline rush.

Get past all that ephemera and you'll witness some genuinely inventive action scenes: John's sporting-goods store mano a mano with a mind-controlled baddie known only as "The Plumber" is a bull-in-a-china-shop delight, while Van Damme and Lundgren give as good as Adkins doles out in the truly insane climactic brawl. It's almost worth wading through the wearisome setup to get to the fun stuff. But there is a reason fast-forward buttons were invented.

Hyams's hifalutin reinvigoration of the series finds Universal Soldier suffering from a different, decidedly anti-Emmerichian, brand of bloat. Simply, Day of Reckoning is too "deep," with Hyams's sundry aesthetic superfluities and thematic aspirations ponderously bogging down his substantial talents as an action filmmaker.