Universal Soldier is a fun, campy movie perfect for a cable watch on a late night or Saturday afternoon. It has a solid premise, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as soldiers who died in Vietnam but have been re-animated and technologically modified into unstoppable weapons by a shadowy wing of the U.S. military. Van Damme is our half-human, half-cyborg hero and Lundgren is a sadistic half-asshole, half-cyborg villain.
Despite its high concept premise (which, in execution, is very derivative of the Terminator franchise), Universal Soldier is more interested in action than sci-fi. The fighting is not particularly well choreographed or viscerally exciting, but the big set pieces (particularly one involving a truck and a bus racing towards a tremendous cliff) are suitably grandiose. Director Roland Emmerich keeps things violent and surprisingly gory at times.
The film’s best quality is actually an unexpected sense of humor, which is just self-aware enough to poke fun at itself without being so ironic as to take away its dumb pleasures. Van Damme is goofy and likable, fairing far better than Lundgren, who seems in over his head in even the most generic of bad guy roles. Ally Walker is charming in a supporting role as a TV reporter to whom Van Damme keeps showing his dick.
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