A few years ago, when I was trying to persuade my older daughter, Juliette, who was then in high school, to join me at a screening of a high-energy summertime tentpole thriller, her reply was something flip on the order of, “Who cares about that?” I offered wheedling recourse to the vox populi, saying, “Lots of people like seeing action films”—to which she responded, “That’s because they don’t have enough drama in their lives.”
And, of course, she was right. Most people don’t leap tall buildings in a single bound or even rappel down them, let alone rocket through the skies to save the world. But significant numbers of people put their bodies on the line at work as police officers or firefighters or in military service—or, for that matter, as athletes in contact sports or even, at play, by mountain-climbing or diving or hang-gliding. Some seek physical adventure, others enjoy it only vicariously, imagining it in movies and books. I’m decidedly in the latter category, but I think that those who look with disdain at the very notion of action—even frivolous and artificial superhero movies—in favor of purely intellectual adventure are avoiding a glimpse at the physical training, skill, and danger on which depends much of what matters in the world.
It’s not a reproach I’d level at Juliette—she’s a surprisingly catholic moviegoer—but, rather, at myself, which is the pre-aesthetic reason (prompted by an outpouring of critical enthusiasm) why I hauled myself off to see “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning” at the Village East Theatre yesterday evening. I was joined at the theatre by about half a dozen other hardy souls for nearly two hours of graphically simulated gore-spatter and clangorously balletic monomachy of bodies and vehicles. But let me stop here before satire creeps even more insidiously into the very description. It’s all too easy to let the gory conventions of the hyper-action genre get in the way of its story and its style. The idea of this movie is simple: John (Scott Adkins), a husband and father in a cozy ranch house is beaten bloody by masked intruders who, before knocking him into a nine-month coma, force him to watch them kill his wife and young daughter. When he wakes up, he goes looking for the killers. Meanwhile, there’s an underground militia of ostensibly free men (and they’re all men)—ones who, according to their leader, Luke Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), have shaken off the shackles of slavery to the government—and the bereft widower follows leads that bring him up against its fierce minions.
The movie is the fourth in a series starring Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren (who’s here, too), dating back to 1992. I haven’t seen the preceding installments, but this one, like those, involves a government project to reanimate soldiers killed in war and to employ them in special and secret missions. The new film plays with the realm of memory and pivots on its emotional power. The director, John Hyams, may be working in a crude and vulgar realm—but the very conjuring of subjective experience is done here with more insistence and more impact than in most recent live-action dramas, with their pristine behavioral naturalism and, where necessary, literalist flashbacks or dreams.
Hyams is a flamboyant director—the opening sequence is done as an extended tracking shot, from John’s point of view, including the horrific impact of blows from a crowbar and his view of his own bloody and shattered face in the shards of a shattered mirror. 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. The classic Hollywood cinema made only sparing recourse to such depths, and did so mainly by implication. The subtle opening of surface events to these depths by way of the symbolic realm was one of the many paradoxical triumphs of (and over) a system of narrowed, censored possibilities and of public proprieties. In effect, “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning” goes where “The Dark Knight Rises” (to take just one example) doesn’t—the domain of psychological documentary—to capture the drive and the horror of the unwilling hero.
There’s no need to overstate the case for the movie, with its often numbing violence (its mise-en-scène is only occasionally witty), plodding exposition, and virtually undeveloped characters. Nonetheless, it proves the point that the classic dramatic values are often better served through utterly non-classical and non-humanistic means. Finer feelings often emerge from the grossly indelicate; a clearer sense of reality often emerges after a vertiginous absorption in outrageous artifice. I don’t know how much of these matters Hyams keeps in mind as he makes the movie; and it doesn’t matter a bit. He casts onto the screen a remarkable batch of raw material—even if much of it is in the form of bloody meat. I’d be hard-pressed to call this movie good or bad. It is, in effect, beyond good and bad, and, in its extreme and hysterical way, forcefully questions more measured cinema (and more sedate lives) in terms that the writer, in his chair, could not have imagined but did, in general, dream of.
