UNIVERSAL SOLDIER
With Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Ed O’Ross, Jerry Orbach, Leon Rippy, Tico Wells, and Ralph Moeller.
With Kurt Russell, Ray Liotta, Madeleine Stowe, Roger E. Mosley, Ken Lerner, Deborah Offner, Carmen Argenziano, and Andy Romano.
With Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks, Jon Lovitz, David Strathairn, Garry Marshall, Megan Cavanagh, and Rosie O’Donnell.
With Alec Baldwin, Meg Ryan, Sydney Walker, Ned Beatty, Patty Duke, Kathy Bates, and Richard Riehle.
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As a corollary to this proposition, we might start thinking about what it actually means to be “this summer’s Batman movie.” To call Batman Returns a fantasy adventure doesn’t really account for why even many adults who dislike it feel obliged to pay it fealty, intellectually as well as financially. Fifteen years ago, it was appalling that George Lucas’s imitating a shot from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will in Star Wars gave him certain academic credentials in the eyes of many intellectuals, the shot supposedly making the movie better, not worse. And now that the New York Times has run an op-ed piece by a couple of college students entitled “Batman and the Jewish Question,” the intellectual stock of the picture seems to have gone up about 200 percent. Although for reasons best known to themselves, the authors take care to state early on that “Batman Returns is not anti-Semitic,” they also have the following to say about the Penguin, whom they persuasively describe as a racist Jewish stereotype: “He spends long hours in the archives compiling lists of first-born sons. Though clearly a reference to the final plague in Exodus, it is also an echo of the accounts of Nazis and anti-Semites throughout history as well as reinforcing the myth that Jews drink the blood of gentile children.” In other words, one might conclude–judging from this article and the current intellectual climate–that the movie might be utterly boring and pretentious, but because it may have been influenced by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion it deserves our respect.
A certain amount of dark humor underlies the conceptions of both Universal Soldier and Unlawful Entry, but you’d have to have seen other recent movies that define their contexts to appreciate the wit. Part of the humor in Universal Soldier derives from an axiom already established in The Terminator: take a dumb-looking, inexpressive, muscle-choked star–Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren here–and turn him into a futuristic machine without emotions and immune to pain, and his liabilities convert to assets.
