I don't know why other reviewers call this "unique". It's all rather mundane as far as the threadbare story is concerned. There's a lot of violence - most of it completely unjustified - and it's dark with not one small bit of humour to relieve the relentless blood splattering. Nothing is explained by the story and the characters are left wading pointlessly through a sea of blood.One thing I will say - if you suffer from anything that can cause seizures due to flashing lights then don't watch this. I don't suffer from anything like that but I found myself feeling rather nauseous at two spots in this film where there was prolonged and excessive flashing - a first for me in my entire movie watching history.Overall a disappointment and if you're hoping for a lot of Van Damme and Lundgren then you'll be very disappointed. It seems they just turned up for the pay cheque, spent 5 minutes on set and then left.

Honestly, it's pretty astonishing that this movie exists; it's the sort of project that could only have been brought into being via complete studio indifference to a franchise that probably should have died almost two decades ago. It's almost comically brutal, frequently surreal, and far, far more pretentious and high-minded than a movie called Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning has any right being. It's an art-horror movie hiding underneath the skin of action trash, and thinking of all the meathead bros who got tricked into watching what can best be described as what would happen if Gaspar Noe remade Apocalypse Now warms the cockles of my withered heart.Maybe I'm overselling this. Universial Soldier: Day of Reckoning isn't quite as deep or clever as it thinks it is, but it WORKS. It's hypnotic and frequently mesmerizing in spite of its flaws, and the action scenes contain some of the best fight choreography you'll see in a modern American action movie. It's not a great movie, but it's damn good, and worth watching if just for what a gutsy move it was to make a late-in- the-game DTV sequel to a trashy movie no one really cares about as genuinely affecting and ambitious as this.

In terms of a pure action film, this is as good as it gets. Jean Claude Van-Damme gives a superb throw-back performance as Luc Devereaux, now a part man part machine cybernetic villain. Scott Adkins gives a memorable performance as a human experiment, and mind-control victim gone rogue. Dolph Lundgren, Andrei Arlovsky, and Roy Jones Jr add to the royal-rumble style atmosphere in this film as well. This film explores the concepts of human experimentation, cloning, artificial intelligence, and revenge all with exceptional cinematography, and thrilling action sequences.

Three years ago, director John Hyams' UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION breathed new life into a thought-dead franchise and thereby made one of the best action pictures of the year. To say that I was interested in seeing this follow-up is an understatement: with a good deal of the previous one's cast and crew returning, along with the new additions of martial arts' "it" guy Scott Adkins and cult fight choreographer Larnell Stovall, this one looked like a surefire topper to its immediate prequel and another great action outing. Did the movie live up to my high expectations? ...well, at least partially. This is, without question, a great action outing with some of the better fight scenes put out this year. However, the same way that REGENERATION was a huge departure from the style of its bouncier predecessors, so too is DAY OF RECKONING a departure from the standard action genre as we know it, with a storyline so far removed from what I was expecting that it took a bit of time for me to contemplate whether it counted for or against the movie. Overall, this one's definitely worth checking out and even buying, but depending on your expectations, it counts as the end of the UNIVERSAL SOLDIER franchise.The story: a husband and father (Adkins, UNDISPUTED 3) is beaten half to death and sees his family murdered before him by Luc Devereaux, the maverick Unisol (Jean-Claude Van Damme). Recovering from his injuries and plagued by inexplicable hallucinations, he sets out to untangle the mystery behind the killing and exact vengeance on Devereaux.For those of you who watched the last film, you'll glean from summary that things do not neatly pick up from where the story left off. Looking at the cast list and film poster, you'll no doubt also wonder what the heck Dolph Lundgren and Andrei Arlovski are doing in this picture, since they'd recently been killed off. And as a matter of fact, why is Luc now killing people? Questions like these, along with several others presented by the film's narrative, have flustered enough viewers for them to declare this a "semi sequel" that's not necessarily part of the same story arc. Me, I think it is a proper sequel, and that we're to assume that a good deal of time has passed since the previous flick and this one. Luc Devereaux has become an enigmatic figure to both allies and enemies with a rather grandiose master plan. The character played by Andrei Arlovski is not the same as his last one. And as for Dolph Lundgren...well, he was cloned once before, wasn't he? I've been able to placate myself with these answers, but people who don't want this kind of ambiguity are probably going to be disappointed.Personally, what jarred me more than any part of the plot was the style of the movie. With its numerous storyline twists, hallucination scenes, and insane amounts of bloodletting, this is very nearly a horror film. Having the characters rediscover parts of their personal history has always been a component of the series, but in DAY OF RECKONING, it's an uninhibitedly dark process, complete with psycho-thriller imagery. I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about it, since this - more than any of the character-related aspects - makes the film feel wholly different from its predecessors. With that said, it does inspire some decent intensity out of the performers. Despite his third-name billing, Scott is clearly the lead in this movie and carries things well, giving a strong performance and again demonstrating why he is the new top action hero in all respects even if Hollywood hasn't caught on yet. Van Damme has surprisingly few scenes in the movie, but those he does partake in are good: he doesn't even need to speak anymore to get his points across, as demonstrated in any scene he shares with his Unisol subordinates (he has those, by the way). Dolph Lundgren has even less screen time than Van Damme, but does okay with another crazy monologue. Andrei Arlovski doesn't have much to act, and love interest Mariah Bonner isn't very memorable.Production-wise, the movie is strong. Action-wise, the film is a powerhouse of extremely brutal hand-to-hand action. Is it as good as I had been expecting? ...it might be better to point that it wasn't *what* I was expecting. After their first collaboration in the aforementioned UNDISPUTED 3 set the bar for all future martial arts flicks, I had been expecting that Adkins and Larnell Stovall would present us with more lightning-speed martial arts wizardry, but what they delivered instead are brawls. Violent, gritty, gory brawls. I think this had to do with the physical constraints of many of the performers, and in a way, it's disappointing...but then again, the fights tend to be better than good and easy to appreciate for both the physicality of the performers and the gamely shooting and editing style of the filmmakers. My personal favorite brawl is the second showdown between Adkins and Arlovski, wherein they beat the hell out of each other with baseball bats. While not the barn-burner I had been hoping it to be, Adkins vs. Van Damme during the finale is definitely the best fight the two have had - beating the snot out of their outings in THE SHEPHERD: BORDER PATROL and ASSASSINATION GAMES.Whether or not you appreciate the movie, I think, depends on both how much you enjoyed the last film and how far you think the action genre can be bent until the filmmakers have to make a choice whether they want to make an action film or a horror flick. The strength of this one's action scenes determined that it could be bent pretty far this time, but overall, I could have done without the change in direction. While there's nothing in the film that I don't explicitly dislike, the things I'm uncertain about keep this one from a higher score.