In the opening scene John (Scott Adkins) sets the screen scene record for a non-cyborg to get hit by a crowbar and survive. As he wanders off into a coma as he watches Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) who is wearing gloves, murder his family. The FBI knows it is Luc, because he "left his prints all over the place." Now is this a clue, or just a screw up?John awakes from his coma and doesn't remember much of his life as he looks for Luc and tries to put things together. He discovers he was not a nice person and that entering a strip joint causes instant healing as he no longer has to use his cane to get around. He teams up with a dancer (Mariah Bonner) who knows the bad him and they go on an adventure having to fight off a "Manchurian" plumber who drives a truck with a self repairing hood.In order to keep things level, people who could act better than Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren were not considered for roles. All around a fairly sorry film for the franchise. Oh, not "Halloween 3" bad, but close.Parental Guide: F-bomb, sex, full frontal nudity (male and female), plenty of blood and exploding heads.

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.

At times this movie tries to be Terminator. There are lots of scenes of super human killers stalking through closed spaces (Terminator police station scene) and of super human killers driving a service truck while chasing the good guy (almost every Terminator movie).At times this movie tries to be Universal Soldier. But those pieces feel thrown in just to warrant the title.The fights are so MMA they become boring.Characters' motivations aren't clear. The Van Damme character and the Dolph character seem to have some relationship, but they're never in the same scene. Looks like each one filmed his scenes on separate days.For Universal Soldier, the problem is not enough action. There are long, woodenly acted scenes of discovery. Even the action scenes have over long build ups. A lot of this movie feels like one of the modern, SFX and camera trick dependent horror movies - not interesting, not scary, but the director showed his technical expertise.The lead actor is awful - a body built, MMA guy with a generic Euro accent.It would be a blessing if someone could remove the memory of this crap from my brain.JCVD's movies were sometimes promoted with the concept of Van Damme-age - "maximum Van Damme-age, double the Van Damme-age. This one is minimum Van Damme-age.

I didn't know what to expect from the last UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, the first one of the franchise is a total classic, the second one was a big disappointment and the third one was a great surprise that gave a new vision to the franchise, in this new film Jean-Claude Van Damme is no longer the main actor, his character has new argumental twist becoming of some kind of colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse now, losing the little mankind he had left, I must say that his performance is what I most liked about the film. This time Scott Adkins is the star, a great martial artist who in my opinion lacks in charisma compared with the greatest stars of the genre,his final fight against JCVD is pretty awesome . Dolph Lundgren also has a brief appearance that really doesn't bring nothing to the story and MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski who played the villain in the previous one repeats his role in this one..This film is darker and most violent than the previous ones, disturbing and at moments confusing , I think is a good closure to the saga although that is not as brilliant as the original Universal Soldier and Universal soldier regeneration..