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Superior Belgian acting combined with an ingenious Hollywood script makes for a superb movie-going experience. Jean-Claude Van Damme is back, in this outstanding sequel to Universal Soldier. This movie has everything: rising conflicts, an intense climax, and a no-nonsense denouement. It has an attractive, Belgian born hero, who gets right to killin' and doesn't waste the viewers' time with wit, correct grammar, or clear, understandable English. It has a suppressed, perhaps even dubious, romance between the two lead characters, so as to keep us wondering when they will climactically embrace. I often found myself on the edge of my seat, clinching the arm rests in anxious anticipation, crying aloud to the character "Just kiss her, damn it!" The movie has the audience-demanded, token movie complication of a best friend turned into bad Sci-borg, who becomes a threat to our protagonist and must be eliminated but miraculously comes back at the end to save our protagonist when our hero faces certain death! The "bad" guys (though I realize this is a passe, barbaric description, and that such distinctions are merely a matter of perspective and it is entirely non-PC in this postmodern day and age) were completely convincing in that they made me believe they wanted to take over the world and kill everybody. It has brilliant comic relief. For example, when one antagonist would be foiled in his mission, he would frustratingly utter about the protagonist, "Boy, I really hate that guy." Throughout the movie it became funnier each time he said it, until, finally, about the seventh time he said it, I was rolling in the movie isles. It also has unpredictable twists and turns, for example, I never expected for the bad guys to kid-nap the hero's daughter all the way up until the point when the movie established that the hero had a daughter (I was completely taken off guard!). The intensity of this movie is evident when the opening scene takes us through a room filled with every hazardous chemical known to man, which are contained in small tanks with such terrifying, esoteric technical labels as "acid". This is ingenious symbolism interwoven into the film by the director that represents the danger and high stakes involved. It communicates, "This movie is bad A!" The writers obviously performed countless hours of meticulous, in-depth research in order to portray mankind's most advanced, high-tech recent developments in AI and computer technology or at least they heard about someone else whose cousin knew some lady whose husband did do such research. Either way, it shows, and they deserve the credit. The movie obviously brings up pertinent issues and moral dilemmas dealing with our computer age and combines this with the originality of its warning, to wit, someday your computer is going to go bad and decide to annihilate mankind. This unsettling realization has certainly made this reviewer a believer, and from now on I'm going to keep a closer eye on my computer. One can only hope that this movie has the box office success that it deserves, so that Hollywood won't hesitate in churning out even more classics of this sort (fortunately, whether it is a success at the box office or not, Hollywood knows what is great movie making and I don't think low box office sales will stop them from continuing to make great films like this). I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, as did my friend who is a scatologist, who said, "It is one of the most interesting specimens I've ever encountered!" Such a sublime, intellectually stimulating work deserves nothing less than 5 out of 5 stars! Rod 'n Reel Reviews
score 10/10
Imradyourenot 29 March 2007
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1627204/ |
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18-2-2021 03:12:09