UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby lt.brannigan on 27 May 2018, 03:00

Personally, I didn't care for DoR on my first viewing, I've got to to go back with an open mind for a rewatch, but it's a valid comparison I think.
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 05 Jun 2018, 23:18

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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 13 Feb 2019, 16:37

In-depth interview with John Hyams from the great "Movie Crypt" podcast
https://moviecrypt.libsyn.com/ep-285-john-hyams
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby dude hallenbeck on 14 Jul 2019, 06:47

https://87eleven.libsyn.com/ep-8-larnell-stovall

Podcast host Cale Schultz (Who played a UniSol in the brothel sequence) interviews choreographer Larnell Stoval exchange a few anecdotes about DoR. Seems it gets a fair amount of TV play and they both mention it has a cult following now.
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 28 Aug 2019, 11:17

Screening September 26 at Seattle's The Beacon
https://thebeacon.film/calendar/movie/u ... f-reckonig

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Great pitch:
“This is more avant-garde than what passes as ‘art cinema’ these days...structured like a video game, we progress through levels of American spaces, from suburbia to motel rooms..” - Neil Bahadur

PREVIOUSLY, ON UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: In 2009 John Hyams, fine sports documentarian and son of the director of OUTLAND, knocked the world of DTV flat on its ass with a grim and shockingly great part 3 (or part 5 including the made for cable 2 and 3). It is one of its decade’s best American action movies and a classic example of a hungry artist taking a disrespected medium far beyond its perceived limitations. Also Dolph Lundgren makes a hell of an impression with a small appearance, the Alec-Baldwin-in-GLENGARRY-GLEN-ROSS-of-DTV.

And now, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING.

Hyams returns, this time in charge from the ground up instead of coming on and reinterpreting someone else’s script. REGENERATION took us off guard because nobody expected a new UNIVERSAL SOLDIER movie to be that serious and that well made. But even now that we thought we’d caught up, this installment is a total surprise. Who would’ve thought the next one would be this?

Unlike the rest of this series, DAY OF RECKONING pretty much feels like a horror movie. REGENERATION was noticeably influenced by ALIEN, ALIENS, THE TERMINATOR and CHILDREN OF MEN. DAY OF RECKONING kept making me think David Lynch – that nightmarish, ominous tone, the heightened atmosphere that makes you always feel like something is off, reality is out of alignment, and something terrible is most likely gonna happen very soon. I don’t know what it is exactly that makes me think of that but it starts with John waking up in a foreboding lab, a weird nurse with an obvious wig feeding him baby food from a tiny spoon. “We’re doing great, aren’t we?” she says when a doctor asks John how he’s feeling. “We’re eating our food.”

How do you get your human rights when you’re really weapons, people liable to beat each other to death over a bottle of water? And if your past experiences make you who you are then what do you do when you find out yours are made up? That Hyams can ask these questions in such a legitimately ass kicking action-horror-sci-fi-noir movie is what makes him so great.

FOR FANS OF: the freedom of straight-to-video filmmaking, deep hypno-drone ultraviolence and sheer brutality, Lost Highway, Gaspar Noe, Michael Haneke, Fritz Lang, movies that operate on dangerous sub-frequencies, oneiric liminal abstractions and wall-to-wall extreme carnage, Fear Factory, pretending not to be quebecois, the wanton destruction of sporting goods stores
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 28 Oct 2019, 11:44

Revisiting the Universal Soldier Franchise
Tom Jolliffe revisits the Universal Soldier franchise…
https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2019/10/ ... franchise/
Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning

Okay… so Hyams establishes himself as somewhat visionary in the previous film and so strong in that vision that he alienates a portion of the most devout Unisol/Van Damme fanbase. So he plays it safe next, right? Hell no. He doubles down. Big time.

There is plenty of action in Day Of Reckoning but what it is at heart is a brain melting, genre-blending but predominant horror that melds Kubrick, Noe, Cronenberg and Lynch and casts Scott Adkins in the leading role as a man whose family is inexplicably murdered by a terrorist leader (Luc Devereaux). He’s left for dead, emerging months later from a coma with only residual flashes of memory and an overwhelming desire to find and kill Devereaux. Nothing is quite as it seems as Adkins turns gumshoe in this dark, macabre and odd cinematic landscape of gruesomeness (but odd beauty).

The film, given its budget and lineage picked up a lot more critical attention than you would expect following a strong festival run. It received a split love/hate response but those who loved it, including some of the most high brow publications around, really loved it. Many, given it starred three action specialists were more surprised than anything at just how strong the vision was (whether they took to it or not). A lot of the reaction to the film rang similar to the reaction a director Nicolas Winding-Refn often gets with his singular vision films. It’s no surprise thus, that Hyams as a film-maker struck a chord with Refn and the pair have been working on the long gestating Maniac Cop reboot (which has now shifted from film project to TV).

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It remains one of Adkins’ strongest performances. Van Damme plays a spectre figure, with Devereaux turning to an almost undead-Colonal Kurtz figure, whilst Lundgren once again raises his game as the returning Scott. The film deals with moral aspects of cloning, manipulation and the philosophical power and meaning of memory. Again, there are shades of Blade Runner and the film is beautifully shot. If you can attune to the grimness, the obtuse story and the violence (with a point, if you can appreciate the point) you will find it rewarding and a film, that belying it’s placing in the straight to video genre bargain bin section has much to revisit and decipher. All meaning aside, for genre fans it has the requisite (expertly choreographed, savagely brutal) action.
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 11 Jan 2020, 02:54

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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 20 Jan 2020, 19:28

UNISOL: DOR is #26 of The 30 Best Movies of the 2010s: K. Austin Collins’s List, Vanity Fair
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... 0s-collins
26. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

John Hyams’s relatively unheralded fourth installment in the Universal Soldier franchise is too brutal to be fun. It’s as difficult to watch—full of body-ripping gunplay and extreme, strobe-like flashes of light and pain—as it is unsettling to think about. From where I’m sitting, that’s exactly the point. Scott Adkins stars as an amnesiac whose wife and daughter have been killed, and whose quest to avenge their deaths leads him toward truths he winds up wishing he never knew. This is a movie that takes a bad cliché, the dead wife, and does something dastardly with it. In the process, through a provocative combination of political mythologizing and extremely unforgiving violence, the movie starts to eat itself from inside, eroding its own images and premises. Few violent movies give me as much to cringe at as to wincingly ponder for days afterward. This is one of them.
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby bomaz on 20 Jan 2020, 22:46

It's awesome to see the movie getting so much love after 8 years.
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Re: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (John Hyams, 2012)

Postby Jox on 02 Mar 2020, 18:09

A selection of rejected key arts for the US poster/cover from the creative agency in charge, Kustom Creative
https://kustomcreative.com/universal-soldier/

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