Private Luc Deveraux and his sadistic sergeant, Andrew Scott, got killed in Vietnam. The army uses their bodies for a secret project - reanimating dead soldiers as deadly obedient cyborgs. However, their memories come back too. Luc Devreux and Andrew Scott are US soldiers who kill each other in Vietnam when Devreux interferes with Scott's slaughter of a friendly village. Listed as MIA, they are actually flash-frozen and shipped to a top-secret facility where a team of scientists led by Colonel Perry turn the two, along with other select specimens, into super-soldiers known as "UniSols." While helping foil a terrorist takeover of the giant McKinley Dam, Devreux starts having flashbacks to his former life, and makes a break from his colleagues. The increasingly human Devreux teams up with TV reporter Veronica Roberts, while they are chased across much of the Midwest by Scott, and also by Perry and the police, who capture them long enough for Scott to find them. After a chase, thinking that they killed Scott in a truck crash, Veronica takes Devreux home to his parents in Louisiana, only to have Scott catch up with them for a brutal confrontation. This is easily Van Damme's best movie. A cool story, lots of action, and an awesome villain in Dolph Lundgren. Better than anything else Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin have made. Action fans will love this. 3 out of 4 stars. AVOID THE SEQUEL! Right around the time this movie came out in 1992 Image Comics was forming, and it wouldn't surprise me if any number of their titles were influenced by "Universal Soldier". I'm thinking of books like 'Youngblood' and 'Brigade', having team members that were mechanically or biologically enhanced for super-human strength and endurance.<br/><br/>The psychobabble reason offered for the Unisols had to do with hyper accelerating the bodies of dead people back to a state of living tissue. To my thinking, dead is dead, so the concept didn't really make sense to me, but I did like Dr. Gregor's (Jerry Orbach) explanation of 'regressive traumatic recall' as the trauma inflicted at the time of death. What might have helped here would have been to get some of the old time horror film scientists on board with a workable premise, guys like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff or Lionel Atwill. They would have come up with something brilliant.<br/><br/>Fans of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren ought to have a pretty good time with this one if all you're looking for is some mindless, escapist and over the top action. It appeared Pepsi went for the big bucks to shut out Coca-Cola for product placement in the film, their logo was all over the place. Watching this back in the Nineties would have put the viewer right smack dab in the middle of the Now Generation.<br/><br/>What I got a kick out of were the subtle attempts at humor like the diner breakfast scene and Ronnie Roberts (Ally Walker) giving GR44 (Van Damme) the once over looking for a small hidden object. Hint - it's probably something hard.<br/><br/>Well look, it's not brain science or rocket surgery, but the picture moves along at a pretty good clip, and even the odds defying elements of the story have their place. If after watching you come away dissatisfied, I guess you could settle into one of those specially rigged lab chairs and grab a shot of that memory clearance formula. Sounds like it would do just the trick. Viewers primed for a postapocalyptic blowout will be disappointed to learn that Universal Soldier is set in the boring old present day, and that until the climactic clash the film is slow-moving and short on firepower.
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