Spawn - Director's Cut

Prior to an infernal makeover that buries his sneer beneath blistered prosthetics, Michael Jai White's Spawn is an unthinking and unrepentant agent of American imperialism. He's a CIA operative who mechanically infiltrates allied nations to (unnecessarily) shred civilians with submachine gun fire before racking up further scores of jet-detonating collateral damage. This wet work is sloppy too, instantly acknowledged by cable news reporters then beamed around an unappreciative world. White carries himself in and around these exterminations like a keyed-in prize fighter, outwardly portraying both a mirthless impatience and a palpable loathing for everyone around him. It comes as no surprise then that White previously essayed an intense, unblinking take on boxer Mike Tyson for an HBO TV movie. To director Mark AZ Dippé's credit, even when burned to a crisp and sheathed in a shining carapace bristling with spiked protrusions, White's superman retains these testosterone-fuelled frustrations. Trapped in the middle of a cataclysmic war between heaven and hell, Spawn simply couldn't care less. 

This occult anti-hero doesn't even flinch when John Leguizamo's drooling Clown more-or-less tells him that he's The Antichrist; a monstrous psychopath designed then steered through a lifetime of extrajudicial murder to better prepare him for his afterlife leading Satan's armies in The Battle of Armageddon. Spawn's too busy stockpiling chopped-up, boutique assault rifles (on loan from Bad Boys) so that he can perforate anonymous henchmen. Dippé's film is unashamedly adolescent in this respect. It's not that this comic book adaptation fails to imbue its characters with any real depth or dimensionality, it doesn't even try. Spawn is best contextualised then as the vehicle through which a certified gold CD soundtrack (featuring contributions that united disparate entities like The Prodigy with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello) was sold. Truly a moment for teenage boys everywhere. The pin-up art style of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane does carry over from the printed page though, translated here into flowing, computer-generated effects that range from still impressive to excretable. Often the problem is simply execution: the technology and mid-range special effects budgets available in the mid-1990s completely failing in their attempts to manufacture sustained, third-act showdowns premised on enormous, abyssal vistas. 

Universal Soldier: The Return

Jean-Claude Van Damme is back as Luc Deveraux. Universal Soldier's reanimated infantryman has beaten back the spectre of death and is now living as a regular, boring human with a job and a family (presumably a mortgage too). He's overcome the kill-bot programming written on top of his former personality, as well as the incessant need to ice himself down. Deveraux's a new man then. Quite how the pointedly deceased grunt has been able to transition from a walking, rotting corpse to a working stiff isn't covered here in any great detail. Who cares right? Mic Rodger's film certainly doesn't. Van Damme's got faces to pull and stunt men to kick.

Universal Soldier: The Return tosses off any idea of physical or psychological rehabilitation for Deveraux. The character is stripped of all the emotional depth you'd expect from someone who has been friendly fired, returned to life as an automaton, then had to fight through the military's multi-tiered murder coding to stake a claim on his own, lapsed humanity. Gone too is the stability promised by Ally Walker's Veronica Roberts, Deveraux's love interest in the previous film. The spunky reporter has died off-screen, leaving Luc with an accident-prone daughter he barely frets about. It's a lot of circuitous, disappointing corrections upfront just to position Van Damme as a mugging action figure with a pronounced interest in female nudity. Seriously, Deveraux doesn't just go cross-eyed staring at his exposed, fitness model colleague Kiana Tom, the entire plot hinges on his familiarity with Internet strip shows. 

Deveraux, despite being chewed-up, spat out, then chewed up again by the US government, is currently working alongside the next generation of UniSols in some ill-defined PR / scab role. The lumpy, grotesquely muscled zombies, as exemplified by pro-wrestling's own Bill Goldberg, all seem to loathe their human attache, attacking him at every available opportunity. Any notion that this enmity might be grounded in the cold storage lads resenting Deveraux's freedom to leave their air-conditioned mausoleum and father children isn't even on Return's radar. Mic Rodgers' film is content to chug along, monotonously drawing husky men together so that they can pulverise barely dressed sets while the audience suffer through Static-X tracks.