Last week I mentioned my Wednesday night tradition. You didn’t click that link, did you? You bunch of lazy fuckers. I swear, if this were a restaurant you’d all be sitting around complaining about how I hadn’t chewed the food enough for you. “I have to click on a link and open a whole new page and then read a bunch of whole new words to find out the context of what’s going on? Really? Maybe I’ll just go back to MySpace where everyone is as dumb and as lazy as I am.” You twats.
Anyway, since none of you clicked on that link, here’s the important bit:
I have class on Wednesday nights, and since school is so much closer to Mokie’s house than it is to my house, and since Mrs. ACW’s class starts as soon as my class lets out, I usually head over to Mokie’s for dinner. That is, as long as there’s nothing good on TV. See, I get HBO and Cinemax, whereas Mokie gets nothing, so before I go over to his house I call to get him to check TV Guide to see what movies might be showing. Most of the time it’s crap like Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (which I’ve now seen about 5 times), or something like Fried Green Steel Magnolias Under the Tuscan Runaway Bride, so I opt to have some dinner with my brother. But he knows that if something badass comes on, like Bloodsport, or Timecop, or Street Fighter, then I’ll have to go home and watch that instead of coming to dinner.
Did you catch that? Three Van Damme movies mentioned at the end. Three. Because he’s the ass-kickingest Frenchman you’ve ever had a homo-erotic sex-fantasy about, and last night, to my surprise, Cinemax was showing Universal Soldier: The Return. Again, I realize you’re lazier than a morbidly obese Matthew Sweet in a sedentary showdown with an old jar of mayonnaise, so you probably won’t click that link, so I’ll elucidate the important details here:
Universal Soldier: The Return was released to lobotomized audiences across the US in 1999, and though it didn’t win any prizes or acclaim, it WAS directed by Some Douchebag. Though I never saw any of the other Universal Soldier movies, I remained confident that I’d be able to keep up.
The tagline was, “Prepare to become obsolete” but it probably should have been, “Prepare to become stupider”.
Here’s a plot outline from IMDB: “Universal Soldier II [wtf? This is Universal Solider: The Return, or at least Universal Soldier IV. People are idiots. - ACW] continues the story of Luc Deveraux, who has survived his experiences as a Universal Soldier, recovered, and is now working as a technical expert on a government project to revive and improve the Universal Soldier training program. When S.E.T.H., the supercomputer controlling the Soldiers, goes haywire and takes over, Luc is the only one who can battle this elite team of deadly, near-perfect warriors.”
That really doesn’t give you the full flavor of the movie though. If I were to write a plot outline, it would go like this:
Boy meets girl. Boy runs away from genetically engineered super-army with girl… on jet skis. Boy fights former WCW wrestler Goldberg. AI computer tries to kill everyone and take over the world. Girl goes away for some reason. Boy meets another girl. Boy has to go to a nearby strip club to access the internet to hack the AI computer to find out who is also hacking the AI computer at the same time so he can stop the other hacker from continuing to hack. 30 minutes of tits. 5 minute overwrought high-school-drama-department monologue by AI computer after having his “portable brain matrix” implanted in a genetically engineered super-soldier. Boy goes back to fight genetically engineered super-army with girl. Guns and explosions and hand to hand combat. Bad pun. Bad pun. Explosion. Bad pun. Plot hole. Plot hole. Bad pun. Explosion. Plot hole. Bad pun. Plot hole. Explosion. Plot hole. Bad pun. Ironic bad-guy comeuppance. Explosion. The end.
I wasn’t really paying attention to the movie, and I kept switching back and forth between that mindless pap and Mythbusters, so I might have missed some extremely important plot points, but I’m pretty sure that the directorial debut of a stuntman with a script written by the douche who also wrote Darkness Falls doesn’t really require that you watch the whole movie. In fact, I’d be shocked if the 30 minute strip club scene didn’t come about because they were at a strip club trying to figure out what to put in the second act.
“Let’s see, the first act is our introduction to the Universal Soldiers, so there’s lots of fighting and explosions.”
“Yeah, and the third act is the final battle and everything that leads up to it, so there’s lots of fighting and explosions.”
“So what to do about the second act?”
They look around, then at each other, then say simultaneously:
“A bar brawl at a strip club!”
Then they high-fived each other and ordered a round of lap dances to celebrate.
