CHASING ARNOLD AND BRUCE: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, UNDER SIEGE, PASSENGER 57© Sean Gallagher
Aug 19, 2003
In 1984, Arnold Schwarzenegger was launched with THE TERMINATOR. He had made other movies before, of course, but this was the one that not only made him a star, but also showed he wasn't just another bodybuilder-turned-actor. After a couple of routine follow-ups, he solidified his position as an action movie superstar with PREDATOR (1987), TOTAL RECALL (1990), and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991). All three were great visceral experiences, but they also had some genuine thought behind the plots. And while Arnold may have looked like a killing machine, the movies actually gave him some depth, or allowed him to play off his image. Around this time, Bruce Willis jump-started his movie career with DIE HARD (1988), where he played a cop who's forced to single-handedly stop a group of crooks who had taken a building hostage for no reason other than money. In 1992, three films came out attempting to clone either Arnold's best films, or DIE HARD: Roland Emmerich's UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, Andrew Davis UNDER SIEGE (DIE HARD on a ship), and Brian Hooks' PASSENGER 57. And it should be no surprise that only UNDER SIEGE is anything approaching halfway decent, since all of them were made solely to be copycats. Emmerich, whose producing partner Dean Devlin, co-wrote the film with Christopher Leitch and Richard Rothstein, showed himself to be a hack with his previous effort, the sci-fi film MOON 44 (1990), and this effort is no different. It sounds like something developed that was inspired by TERMINATOR, or for Arnold to actually star in, and luckily for him, he passed. Either way, there's nothing here to even compare to his movies. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren star as U.S. soldiers who are in Vietnam. While Andrew (Lundgren) has been driven crazy by the war, and starts massacring a village, Luc (Van Damme) just wants to go home, and horrified by his superior, tries to stop him. In the ensuing fight, both are killed. 25 years later however, their bodies are revived by a military scientist (Jerry Orbach) who cyrogenically froze them and injected them with a serum to wipe out all their memories. The purpose? To create a corps of indestructible soldiers, who can be used, among other things, to fight terrorists. Except the serum doesn't completely work, because Luc remembers that he just wants to go home, and Andrew remembers that he's a psycho, and just wants to kill everybody.
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