Masters of the Universe

Barbie for boys, right? That had to be the pitch echoing around Amazon headquarters a few years back. Director Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe - screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham - attempts a similar sort of trick as Greta Gerwig's film by ascribing three-dimensional torments and traumas to plastic, two-dimensional characters. Although not directly dissected within the piece, this Masters of the Universe (like Barbie) posits an unchanging layer of reality, distinct from our own lived experience, that operates with the strange, impenetrable logic of children at play. Soldiers, who cannot understand that they are toys, stand glowering at their mutated opponents; the front line of a war trapped in perpetual stalemate. This impasse holding until the imagination that is arranging these battles returns and completes their game. They don't even have names without him. So, after escaping through a swirling portal in the midst of a coup, Prince Adam of Eternia is stranded on Earth for fifteen years, desperately searching for the power sword he lost in psychedelic transit. 

Like the title character in John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, any interim between the sacking of his kingdom and the mindless toil that greets him in manhood - the Cimmerian endlessly turning an enormous grain mill, singlehandedly; Prince Adam working for HR in a strict, backbiting American office - is deemed extraneous and elided here. Unlike Margot Robbie's doll though, Nicholas Galitzine's pretender to the throne isn't yet the finished article. He hasn't completely assumed the role of beloved action figure. The rotoscoped, cornball antics of Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe television series may exist as a yet-to-be-achieved state of success within Knight's film but, this blaring simulacrum aside, there is something very different about Prince Adam the person. Surrounded by stock characters and bullied incessantly as a child for his perceived weakness, Adam is, as his mother hints, unstuck and atypical in this setting. He doesn't instantly fulfil a role within the wider play setting. He is, in fact, a chimera: a hybrid that combines the imaginative energies that course through this fictional realm with the deeper, much more complicated emotional range of an actual human being. 

Adam's assumption of Grayskull's cosmic power then a condition of an uncanny birthright - his mother a lost astronaut originating from Earth; his father an unsparing, PVC warrior - that allows him to channel and iterate on hackneyed skirmish. This boon isn't then something that can passed freely between the rest of Mattel's product range. Impressively loud, thanks to Daniel Pemberton's thundering score and Brian May's superheroic licks, Masters of the Universe may betray a similar sort of studied irreverence as a Taika Waititi Thor (or last year's A Minecraft Movie for that matter) but Knight's vision is presented with a kind of 5½ inch fluency that registers as celebratory rather than mocking. So, Karg and even Pigboy (as well as Dolph Lundgren in a cameo that plays like a DVD extra) from 1987's Masters of the Universe cohabit with characters plucked out of syndicated cartoons, Little Golden Books, and a Trap Jaw, played by Sam C. Wilson, that could be kin to Chris Cunningham's Mean Angel from 1995's Judge Dredd. This lovingly curated brand maintenance (as that is exactly what this is) exists within a piece that, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakthrough hit, quotes liberally from the stadium rock wing of the action-fantasy canon: Queen tracks are lifted straight out of Highlander to serve space opera theatrics on loan from Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon. All of which is to say that, in presenting itself as a mutant patchwork of clashing, barely compatible sources, Masters of the Universe 2026 is an appropriately cacophonous adaptation of a 1980s toyline. 

Johnny Mnemonic: in Black and White

Trapped somewhere between Blade Runner and The Matrix, aesthetically as well as chronologically, director Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic immediately benefits from any proximity to the latter, the project on which actor Keanu Reeves firmly ascended to his position as one of cyberpunk's holiest messiahs. The thirty years of real-life socioeconomic downturn that has occurred since cameras rolled on this adaptation of a William Gibson short story hasn't harmed the film either, with amateur futurologists noting that more or less every single worst case scenario threatened in Wired's 1997 article The Long Boom has come to pass (in some form) in the decades since. That which registered as pointedly downcast back in 1995, when Mnemonic was originally released, now plays like eerie prescience, particularly the idea that the unceasing data firing at human beings can have a palpable and even detrimental physiological effect. Although this information overload may not trigger the bodily ruptures described in Mnemonic, it'd be laughable to argue that the weaponised blurbs now blasting out of every person's pocket haven't melted a lot of people's brains into a reactionary goo. Re-released on home video in 2022 with a new colour grading that has tweaked Mnemonic to be monochromatic, Longo's film is now better able to present itself as queasy, ideas-driven science fiction rather than a failing attempt at an exciting, post-Speed blockbuster. In black and white, Reeves' face now reads as luminous and glaring: a light source destined to be imprisoned inside the headsets and hardware that the filmmakers have lifted straight out of Shinya Tsukamoto's seminal works of technological alienation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. 

Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago - The Ultimate Director's Cut

Writer-director Sylvester Stallone returns to Rocky IV for a (belated) 35th anniversary Director's Cut, determined to trim and repackage his hyperbolic feature until it provides a more obvious point of connection with the rest of the punch-drunk boxing series - particularly the two most recent entries, Ryan Coogler's Creed and Steven Caple Jr's Creed II. Stallone's most obvious alterations then are focused around the character of Apollo Creed, unearthing unseen footage and alternative takes then sewing them back into the film in an attempt to massage the character's previously ignominious death towards some note of dignity. This director's cut also begins with a truly massive recap section, played upfront and presumably for neophytes, that slashes Rocky III down to eight minutes of footage centred around the moments where Rocky and Apollo's relationship thawed, transforming from a bruised-up rivalry into a dear friendship. 

Stallone and project editors Dov Samuel, Justin Barham and Kate Prescott have completely reorganised Rocky IV's first act, deleting Paulie's birthday party, and the rickety robot that his brother-in-law presents to him, to find more space for Carl Weathers and a kitchen corner for Talia Shire's worried Adrian. Weathers benefits the most in this assembly, his Creed elevated from an afterthought in Rocky's Cold War battering arc to an active participant in his own, curtailed, story. With Rocky unenthused by challenges from Drago and his Russian entourage it's Apollo who lobbies for, then receives, the exhibition fight with Dolph Lundgren's Soviet superman. The former heavyweight champion explicitly doing so out of a misplaced sense of patriotism - one lost on the comfortably oblivious Balboas. In the theatrical cut Apollo assumes this sacrificial lamb role out of pure plot mechanism; here Stallone splices around his own indifferent boxer, allowing an anxious Apollo to fill the frame and speak to his friend about geopolitical concepts that - quite apparently - have never occurred to the Italian Stallion. 

Structurally, the fight between Apollo and Drago is completely different here too. Stallone and his editors weave a palpable sense of unease into the deliberately bombastic proceedings. While Apollo dances around with James Brown to Living in America, the film focuses on the grim expression taking hold on the faces of Adrian and Sylvia Meals' Mary Anne Creed. There is no submission to the gaudiness of the pre-fight spectacle. While Drago has been colour corrected to the point where he seems to be radiating light, Apollo's cavorting strikes a note of mania or, perhaps more accurately, desperation in this edit. Weathers plays a condemned man trying to bluster his way through an impending death sentence. Speaking of wives, Drago's other half, played by Stallone's ex Brigitte Nielsen, has been almost completely excised from the film. Ludmilla's role has been reduced to little more than a neutral glance between herself and Mrs Creed and the moment where she allows Drago's handler, played by Michael Pataki, to place a cigarette in her mouth - an interlude that has always suggested a note of sexual impotence in Lundgren's technological titan. 

The decision to omit so much of Nielsen's performance is disappointing - even suspect given Stallone's marital history with the actress - but the deletions do somewhat align a 1985 character - who was, originally, aggressively personable - with the Ice Queen seen in the second Creed film. 2018's Ludmilla, now cushy with the golden oligarchs running modern Russia, goes out of her way to reject her former husband and their child, essentially consigning them to an ongoing exile in Ukraine. Generously, you could offer then that Stallone was simply reaching for a sense of unity with the Caple Jr film rather than, say, picking at a personal grudge. With Nielsen's character all but erased Stallone instead uses Lundgren to suggest a (malfunctioning) human element within the Soviet machinery. Following his fight with Creed - in which Ivan has been used as an unthinking proxy to level a blow against the United States - Drago starts chanting his own name, over and over, as if on the verge of a tearful breakthrough. A programming blip that seems to suggest that the Russians are pumping their prize boxer full of something more than just steroid cocktails. 

Originally screened at 1.85:1, this re-aligned cut crops the image to cinemascope dimensions, Stallone further focusing the eye on contorting faces as the beats powering his film's edit. It's an assembly edict not completely dissimilar to the one Stallone and director John Flynn employed for their prison film Lock Up. There the weather-beaten extras conferred weight on an otherwise light story; here Stallone's choices seem indicative of a nostalgic affection for many of his fellow cast members. Thankfully, none of Rocky IV's unassailable training montages have been altered or re-ordered to any significant degree. If anything these MTV sequences are buoyed by a modern sound mix that discerns discrete layers and electronic separation in Vince DiCola and John Cafferty's adrenalin hammered music. As with the opening Creed bout, the Moscow set sequence that concludes IV has been completely reworked. Stallone's director's cut uses pounding repetition, and overlapping, multi-channel intensity, to place the viewer inside the action. IV now generates a panicking back-and-forth, not just in terms of the physical assaults battering away at Rocky and Drago but also the confidence-sapping glances they each take at their horrified loved ones. This decision - coupled with a foley design that suggests wooden clubs striking meat - leaves the audience with the unshakable impression of having witnessed two beasts, locked together in agony, pulverising each other. 

Universal Soldier

Universal Soldier's finest moments are fleeting but indelible; brief blips revolving around Dolph Lundgren's zapped-out, reanimated war criminal. Despite the film's horrific conceit - dead 'Nam veterans are resurrected as automated meat shields then used to defuse hostage situations - director Roland Emmerich is much more excited about presenting his stars as muscled intruders, upsetting gormless locals with their loud, pneumatic behaviour. These wildly disparate ideas only really knit together in one scene, and it's all thanks to the ear-collecting mania that Lundgren invests in his Sergeant Andrew Scott.

Following an unsuccessful, not to mention incompetent, attempt to capture or eliminate Jean-Claude Van Damme's Luc Deveraux, Scott is lumbered with several chewed-up, unresponsive underlings. In order to function effectively these souped-up stiffs must be kept on ice, leaving Scott no alternative but to drag these mushy comrades around a supermarket in search of cold storage. Scott screams at vacant shoppers and shelf-stackers, demanding they point him towards the nearest walk-in freezer. Once his men are dumped in a meat locker, Scott returns to the shop floor to hold court, ranting and raving to a stunned, schlubby audience about the 'treachery' of the South Vietnamese.

Lundgren's performance defies the neglect of Richard Rothstein, Christopher Leitch, and Dean Devlin's screenplay, motoring along entirely on the actor's raw, babbling enthusiasm. It is to Emmerich's credit that he, quite apparently, just got out of the way. Lundgren shrieks and booms, mispronouncing words then taking rote tough guy talk off in new, incomprehensible directions. Comparatively, Luc Deveraux's reawakening is a slow process, prickled then catalysed by the sameness of the situations he finds himself in. Van Damme portrays his enlightenment as a kind of rebirth, resetting Deveraux to an innocent, almost childlike state. The film leverages this into farcical situations designed to exploit Van Damme's boyish good looks and willingness (or outright desire) to disrobe.

Lundgren gets much more to chew on then. Scott, it seems, broke his programming much earlier than Deveraux, happy to play along with the military-industrial complex's latest bone-headed scheme simply because it gave him ample opportunity to brutalise people. Out on his first (screen) mission Scott, referred to by his undead call-sign GR13, is set the task of silently eliminating a posted guard. While Van Damme's GR44 heroically punches his quarry unconscious, GR13 twists his guy's head off then stamps on the prone, dead body. Universal Soldier proposes a war between a reluctant professional and a raving lunatic but then gets lost along the way, delaying the expected collision and invincible flesh conceit to amble along sex-comedy side roads that don't actually lead anywhere.

The Punisher

Mark Goldblatt puts his time as Paul Verhoeven's second-unit director to good use with The Punisher, an impatient set-piece generator that combines the interlaced fuzz of RoboCop with the vulgar, home video opportunism of The Cannon Group. Dolph Lundgren plays the titular vigilante as disconnected and bereaved. The pure machinery of Marvel Comics' ruthlessly motivated exterminator is in here somewhere, massaged by a depiction that screenwriter Boaz Yakin likely hoped would register as, at-least, semi-human. Cursed with essentially the same backstory as his newsprint forebear, Lundgren's Frank Castle glooms in biker leathers, loaded down with army surplus and branded stiletto daggers.

Lundgren's chiselled, beautiful face is shaped into a glaring death mask with heavy, waxen make-up and a pencilled in beard that gifts the actor a knife-edge contouring. Lundgren's louche violence and the lovingly photographed automatic weaponry would be star-making if Goldblatt's film wasn't so thin. Lundgren is working at being iconic: he's a heavy metal Elvis gyrating with chopped and converted firearms in a piece that is happy to be simply diverting. The film's main dramatic push then concerns a back-and-forth between a legion of Anytown Mafiosa and a gang of arrogant, marauding Yakuza. Naturally the depiction of the Japanese gangsters combines every possible permutation of video shop Orientalism.

Shuriken, sexualised cruelty, white slave trading, and Kim Miyori's one-dimensional (but enjoyably vindictive) Dragon Lady boss are all pressed into service to illustrate the sub-human otherness of these invading criminals. This blunt exoticism combined with The Punisher's decision to team up with Jeroen Krabbe's heavily accessorised mob don lends Goldblatt's film the air of 1940s propaganda. American criminals are still American after all. In this sense The Punisher is not so much an adaptation of Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr and Ross Andru's craniomanic character, rather it is a stuttering live action run-through of the imagery that Frank Miller lifted out of sombre Samurai manga then transplanted into the Western comic canon via his electric Daredevil run. 

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rocky IV

Sylvester Stallone is an incredibly manipulative director. There's no finesse in his approach, he doesn't trust you to put two and two together. He lambastes his audience, rubbing their faces in his agenda. He doesn't insinuate, he smears. That's exactly why Rocky IV is so excellent. Stallone has finally stopped trying to use his increasingly creaky writing to deliver his sermons, arriving at a style of communication that unfolds like a barrage of adrenaline-pumped commercials. In Rocky IV the writer-director uses montage to underscore the sheer scale of Balboa's dilemma. The sports movie staple is transformed from an expositional short-hand into the film's dramatic and emotional backbone. Editors John W Wheeler and Don Zimmerman deliver several successive sequences that encapsulate not only the very real, physical progress Rocky needs to be able to confront his foe but also the athlete's headspace. It's not just the boxer's body that is growing, Balboa is sharpening his mind too. He picks apart his recent past, holding on to certain memories as the grist needed to power himself through the final battle.

Thousands of miles away, Dolph Lundgren's Drago trains alone in a series of enormous empty spaces, bathed in blaring reds and bolstered by an enthusiastic course of performance enhancing injections. Stallone presents the Russian as basically a robot; there's clearly an insinuation that Ivan has been grown in a lab somewhere with the express purpose of humbling America before the world. Drago has zero tangible motivation beyond success. His wife hovers around him like a disconnected WWF valet and when the giant speaks he always sounds like he's on the verge of a tearful breakdown. He's a monster, a manufactured man, trapped and endlessly reconfiguring himself amongst sterile, terrifying machinery.

Rocky's training is completely different. He journeys, by request, to a remote, snowy corner of the Soviet Union, tuning his regime around basic, homely tasks. He doesn't need a state-of-the-art tilting treadmill, he has an actual mountain to climb. Drago's gym sessions are about an enforced isolation, the Party confining him in an environment tailor-made to enhance him physically. They drug and push him until his personality is all but obliterated. The boxer is whipped and tested until he has completely retreated into himself.

Stallone shows us - tells us - this is how Drago can be defeated. He has no will of his own, everything is imposed upon him by his superiors. He's a soldier following orders whereas Rocky is a man making decisions. It's no accident that Stallone follows a series of shots illustrating the Russian's passive acceptance of steroids with an image of Rocky crushing his opponent's likeness. Stallone is assuring us that Drago has already lost. All the writer-director needs to do now is state a convincing enough case for this defeat. Rocky III proposed complacency as its hero's Achilles' Heel. Home comforts and arrogance combining to kill Rocky's all-consuming desire to win. III gave us a Rocky that no longer had anything left to aspire to. He'd won. Rocky IV acknowledges the tonal missteps surrounding this dramatic dead end and how it mutated the perception of the Clubber Lang character. This time Rocky has learnt his lesson, he is taking his opponent seriously, knowing that he is clearly the underdog. The boxer understands from the get-go that he will have to elevate himself. Stallone also takes time within this environment of total exercise to underscore how important Talia Shire's Adrian is to Rocky and, by extension, the film series as a whole.

Brigitte Nielsen and Lundgren's characters are always separated, they never really occupy the same physical or filmic space. They are apart by design. Comparatively, Adrian is portrayed as a crucial component in Rocky's ability to truly succeed. Her arrival in the Soviet Union - after first refusing to follow Rocky - interrupts the film's incessant montaging, forcing us to sit with a quiet moment in which husband and wife slowly circle each other, acknowledging their need to be together. Adrian is then folded into the fabric of Rocky's physical exertion, nodding decisively as her man pushes himself beyond his limits. Adrian is her husband's rock, offering love and unconditional support, two things Drago absolutely does not have. Rocky's geographically remote training also serves another purpose - it re-establishes the boxer as a working class hero. The misguided, millionaire pageantry of Rocky III is gone, replaced by a laboured, soulful communion with the people and land of the Soviet Union. While Drago roams around his gilded cage, Rocky is mixing it up with the locals: chopping their wood, righting their antique carriages. He's becoming immersed, reminding himself what it is to be a commoner. The politics of Rocky IV may be naïve and hopelessly optimistic in terms of the real value offered by the American regime but Stallone is still able to communicate an underlining note of sincerity.

Rocky doesn't arrive as a conqueror, he comes willing to learn. Drago's country has shaped the Russian boxer into something truly fearsome. By billeting with his team in a snowy wilderness, Rocky is attempting to experience this transformative quality for himself. The American rejects the hospitality of the state to bunk with farmers. He pushes himself by wading through snow drifts and mantling hostile terrain. Rocky is absorbing a defining aspect of the Russian national character - endurance. Rocky's pig-headed desire to force himself through his body's limitations not only makes the admiration he later receives from the Soviet crowd understandable, it was actually inevitable.

Finally Stallone uses a substantial amount of the last match to demonstrate and stress Rocky's physical and martial failings. For a start, he's too short to box the towering Drago: Rocky must leap to strike his opponent's face. Then there's the fact that he never makes any attempt to protects his head. Over and over again we see Rocky soak up Drago's reality warping blows and beg for more. It's insane but what better way to appeal to a nation that fed millions into the meat grinder to halt Hitler's march east? How could the average Russian not admire Rocky's fortitude, his suicidal belligerence? Following Drago's petulant, childish declaration that he fights only for himself it is Rocky that better exemplifies the emotionally remote, taciturn attitude of this home crowd. 

With this in mind Rocky IV isn't so much about a cultural victory for capitalism and The American Way as it is a sombre acceptance that the United States and the Soviet Union are united in their appreciation of pure, unthinking force. Throughout the 1980s Sylvester Stallone used tales of assailed masculinity to try and confer a mythic, almost religious quality to his image. As Rambo: First Blood Part II demonstrated, Stallone was happy to junk an airtight action screenplay if it meant he could spend more time filling the cinema screen with his neoclassical mug. Rocky IV then represents his most complete, exhilarating attempt yet. The writer-director takes his simple, lovable boxer from Philadelphia and elevates him to the level of demigod. Rocky, backed by Vince DiCola's celestial workout music, wins by not losing. He sacrifices his body and, as we learn in Rocky V, his mind to batter at ideological barriers and earn not only his opponent's respect, but the adulation of America's most terrifying enemy.

Masters of the Universe

Conceived in the epic tradition of Santa Claus: The Movie, Cannon Films' Masters of the Universe is a kid's eye view of an eternal conflict. Rather than revolve around the final battle between the forces of good and evil, the established players of the toy line are jettisoned to concentrate on the human story of Courteney Cox's mopey orphan Julie. Stranded on Earth after a coup, Dolph Lundgren's He-Man is an unknowable bit player in his own story. I suppose the filmmakers think they're patterning their narrative after Luke Skywalker's arc in Star Wars - the naive teenager as a means to discover, and engage with a larger story. Unfortunately, no real reason is found why this Earth kid should be involved at all. The sick synthesiser skills of Julie's boyfriend Kevin do enable the marooned Eternians to make their way home, but once back in Castle Grayskull the teenagers cower in a corner whilst He-Man battles Frank Langella's cosmically powered, Shakespearean Skeletor.

Although limiting the vast majority of the action to a Californian suburb is obviously a budgetary call, it does give Masters a bit of Kirby crackle - seeing mutoid scumbags appear out of nowhere to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of Earth lends the film a Fourth World feel. This effect is heightened by the teenager's utter distress at being caught in the crossfire. Although introduced to Mattel's monsters separately, both Julie and Kevin are rendered near catatonic by the sheer impossibility of what they are experiencing. When Skeletor's mercenaries explode into his girlfriend's home, Kevin has a complete break with reality, tossing paper plates and hysterically pleading with his attackers to "get out of here". Although the alien and the everyday never knit together to become a greater whole in Masters of the Universe, the clash between them is so awkward and traumatic for the Earth characters that I didn't actually mind that a Beast Man, designed by French cartoonist Moebius, had been reduced to beating up a high school janitor.

The Expendables 2

I was quite fond of The Expendables. Sylvester Stallone's 80s action mega-mix neatly juggled a reductive police action plot, with some gonzo character moments. Each actor appeared to be playing an amped up version of themselves: Stallone was codgery but desperate to please; Statham, unlucky in love with beautiful brunettes; Jet Li working overtime to support two families; Stone Cold Steve Austin quite happy to strike a woman. It was a film with a pro-wrestling mindset, turning up personality tics and tricks against a backdrop of Commie stomping and big government mistrust. All that and Sly seemed to have spent hours cruising YouTube for bite sized attention grabbers to co-opt for the big screen. Expendables was a piece engaged with the type of viewer who delights at record breaking pistol reloads, or seeing an American twenty-somethings - who are pretending to be Russian - chopping up the landscape with their latest combat shotgun. It was crass and shallow, but betrayed a slathering, uncompromising affection for also-ran 80s thugs and their modern equivalents.

The Expendables 2 takes a different tact, perhaps trying to recontextualise the sappy, barely reconstructed personas that Sly and the gang struggled with during the early 1990s. Stallone's doomed relationship with a perky surrogate son pokes at the same mutant identity areas as the last film, but the execution is clumsy. The film plays like a TV movie, with a plot better suited to a modern-day A-Team pilot than an all-in genre stomp. Director Simon West lets the Planet Hollywood trifecta burn screen time cracking gentle jokes in static set-ups whilst Jason Statham is relegated to one tiny feature thump - a knife ninja remix of Clint Eastwood's entrance in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

The rest of the original cast get it worse. The wonderful Terry Crews is made to play second-fiddle (in the realm of enormous firearms) to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Li bails out after the first mission. Lundgren is a mere background player here, doomed to blow kisses at Stallone's future squeeze Yu Nan. The underdog charm of the first film is jettisoned then in favour of (fading) A-list indifference. It's fun to see Schwarzenegger marching forwards firing a Call of Duty gun without blinking, but it's a fleeting joy. The only person really trying is Jean-Claude Van Damme. His character, Jean Vilain, seems to be the only role still operating on the first film's private-life-as-action-reality premise. His sinewy, euro-trash arrogance perfectly suited to make adversarial moves against Stallone's dull macho internalism. For all its faults Expendables 2 is one of the few films that really taps into Van Damme's dickish, sport shagger appeal. If we are to suffer an Expendables 3, Stallone would be well advised to seek assistance from some of the behind-the-scenes stars of 80s action cinema. I'm sure Steven E de Souza could knock up a suitably hyperbolic script for jailbird John McTiernan to direct.

DAY OF RECKONING

What is a special effect? Is it seeing a computer animated sequence of Iron Man's house falling off a cliffside whilst our hero struggles to free himself from the rubble? Or is it seeing Dolph Lundgren's wrinkly red face screaming directly into camera about self-determination? Is it more exciting when your brain experiences that tranquilised buzz you associate with CG, or when you see someone real locked into ludicrous? I submit that there's more juice in witnessing a shotgun fired a few inches above a man's hairline than a million missile merchandise helicopters. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning looks incredible. They should let John Hyams do a Terminator movie.

Heads up

NEVER ENDS

An underworld staffed by revolting reanimated war veterans? Van Dammage leading home invasions with a BIC'd head? A story that seems heavily indebted to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness? Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning? Fuck yeah!

I COME IN PEACE!

Also Van Damme

Sylvester Stallone hands stewardship duties on The Expendables over to Simon West, a former Jerry Bruckheimer stable shooter who peaked with 1997's endlessly rewatchable Con Air. I've never felt like Mr West got his due for Con Air. The film is routinely heaped in with Michael Bay's usual one-note action sludge, despite having a sly self-awareness, and operating sense of humour. It resembles Bayhem, that's undeniable, but it has an ironic streak that'd have Michael scrunching his face up in confusion. Also Van Damme.

Ten Films 2010: Universal Soldier: Regeneration

A dour science-fiction nasty that operates on a pleasantly clipped shorthand. Specifically, machine men batter and brutalise each other against a derelict Soviet backdrop, their violence an atypically ugly MMA stomp. Jean-Claude Van Damme returns as a lined relic, kidnapped and doped up by panicking officials to face a rogue muscle monster with a pit bull mindset. Dolph Lundgren floats around as a confused clone, fixated on violent repetition, but unable to understand why. None of the heavily augmented soldiers display any recognisably human traits. Each is an automaton locked into their own distinct, mechanised predicament. Further to this, Van Damme's character doesn't triumph because of any underlining humanity, rather Deveraux is simply the most recently maintained - his performance supplemented by a battlefield deployed syringe of psychotropic amphetamines. Everyone in Universal Soldier: Regeneration is alien; no-one can be related to. These aren't men anymore, and the film knows this. It revels in it.

The Expendables

Sylvester Stallone speaks directly to lower brain functions. The director-actor understands that an action movie can have an outline rather than a plot; that how you dress this frame can more than compensate for a lack of any so-called higher artistic aspirations. Basically, The Expendables is your standard buddy black op. An elite pack of psychopaths must unlawfully invade a Latin American country suffering under a crackpot dictatorship and tear everything apart. For spice, the weak-piss Generalissimo is backed by ex-CIA heavies, with abilities that mirror our heroes, looking for somewhere tropical to get their coca crop grown. Continuing the body horror thread that the director hit upon in 2008's Rambo, Stallone's Expendables is dressed with traumatic ultra-violence. The film often most concerned with how easily a human body can be pulverised until it resembles nothing at all. 

Accordingly, each of the mission men is assigned a ruinous, comic book superpower: Stallone is a quick-hand pistolero; Jason Statham a shuriken sniper; Jet Li a wushu bushwhacker; Randy Couture is a tumbling MMA bone snapper. Terry Crews becomes an instant action icon thanks to a spot demoing the latest in combat shotgun technology from Military Police Systems Inc. Crews' performance as Hale Caesar plays like an embedded teaser trailer for a one-man army franchise that audiences are sure to demand. Unusually, nobody is marginalised. Everybody gets their moment and an admiring close-up. Stallone shoots deep-focus faces, daring you to stare at the canyons and crevices lived into these frowned up fizzogs. Stallone's eye is loving and sympathetic, particularly when regarding the brooding confusion of Dolph Lundgren's Gunner, a satellite crew member who gets a meta-textual encore. Sylvester Stallone, an actor's director? Who knew?

Universal Soldier: Regeneration

Emboldened by the goodwill generated by recent hit JCVD, and perhaps Sylvester Stallone's successful run of reboots, Jean-Claude Van Damme retreats to his only real franchise for a payday. In conception then Universal Soldier: Regeneration is worrying similar to 1999's stinker Universal Soldier: The Return: Van Damme as a lone super soldier battling a zeitgeist muscle man. Return saw Van Damme battling charmless WCW breeze block Bill Goldberg, whilst Regeneration pits the ageing star against Belarusian MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski. Thankfully, the similarities cease there. Whereas Return was a pocket money distraction for subnormal teenagers, Regeneration entertains ideas that form a credible meta-text about star personas.

Like Rambo, or even The Wrestler, Regeneration distils the appeal of its lead down to one idea, then ruthlessly delivers on it. Here, Van Damme is simply an efficient killing machine. No effort is expended to create any recognisable human traits or feelings for Van Damme's Luc Deveraux. The absence of character, is the character. This imposed limitation eliminates the need for any motivational downtime, as well as organically strengthening the hijacked man conceit. Deveraux isn't human anymore. He's a reanimated corpse, programmed to harm. Why should he have any drives other than his orders? In domestic scenes Van Damme is numb and zombielike. Drugged up and placed in the field though, he's a career best murderer, effortlessly driving long, prowling flashes of predatory knife play against shrieking stunt performers. Universal Soldier: Regeneration isn't about anything other than a group of emotionless machine-men beating each other to death in a utilitarian ruin. Quite right too.