Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

johnmckinleyphillips I came across this movie on Netflix a while back and thought I had found Van Damme's 1992 movie. I was quite disappointed to find this turd instead. The acting was horrible. The video and audio quality was so bad the audio actually crackled at times. Go ahead and drop a brick on your head instead. If I could give it a negative vote I would.

DigitalRevenantX7 A top-secret government project to create the perfect soldier goes horribly wrong when the unstable cyborgs break out of their containment cells & massacre the scientists & military personnel guarding the project.Not to be confused with the Roland Emmerich-Jeff Woolnough-Mic Rodgers-John Hyams series starring Jean-Claude Van Damme & Dolph Lundgren, Universal Soldiers is a typical Asylum mockbuster. The Asylum, in case you don't know, is an independent production company in California with a bad history of ripping off other filmmakers' ideas & making their films on the cheap in order to make a quick buck, often having deceptive titles to confuse customers into buying their DVDs. In recent years, they have cleaned up their act somewhat & produced some reasonable genre films, in particular the Sharknado phenomenon of late.Universal Soldiers is typical of many Asylum mockbusters, made at the height of the company's output in 2007, where they produced numerous mockbusters that ripped off many big-budget mainstream genre films. This example is written by Geoff Meed, a South African actor who also writes his own scripts, & directed by Griff Furst. Meed & Furst had earlier made I AM OMEGA, a cheap I Am Legend adaptation that was one of the better films in the Asylum canon but Universal Soldiers is very different from that.The film is terrible. Or to put it more delicately, it is astoundingly inept. There is virtually no plot – all it consists is of a group of soldiers standing out in the open bickering amongst themselves in between being picked off by some pale-skinned cyborgs who use CGI spears to kill their victims. The visual effects border on the cheap – some remarkably poor CGI used for the cyborgs' vision – which looks like someone merged a computer desktop screen with a red-tinted filter. The makeup effects are barely passable & continuity goes out the window – characters' guns go empty in one scene yet magically replenish their ammo in the next. Meed's writing is also so slack that you can't take the film seriously – once all the cyborgs are dead (and it is never made particularly clear exactly how many of the cyborgs there are), there is a massive 50-foot robot skeleton thrown in just to keep the film going for another ten minutes or so.As far as acting goes, the actors do a remarkably poor job of playing a military unit. In real life, soldiers will conduct their business with a lot more efficiency than the losers depicted here. As it stands, none of them make any pretence at being professional. The Asylum's penchant for corner-cutting leaves some of the dialogue to be made unintelligible by wind shear.

TheLittleSongbird Maybe I need to re-order my bottom 5 Asylum movies, because Universal Soldiers is deserving of a spot there. You can really tell how low on budget the film was, the editing is the choppiest of any film I've seen in a while, while the scenery is dully lit and the effects are incredibly fake-looking, most of them don't even look like what they were meant to be. Even the props are bad, there was one that looked as though it was made of wood but seeing as the prop broke it could as well have been made of the cheapest plastic anybody could find. The music is repetitive, has no momentum whatsoever and actually feels dated, while the sound effects verge on bizarre, some even are repeated over and over again. The script is stilted and feels too talky often, while the story is so thin in structure and so ponderous in pace that you question whether there is one at all and when there is the all too few signs of one it's predictably done. The characters are annoying and are never developed, while the acting from everybody involved reads of everybody just improvising in a very bored way on screen. Overall, Universal Soldiers is an awful film that has no life to it. 1/10 Bethany Cox

kot426 I watched it all the way through just to gaze at two of the main male actors. YUM! Worth the agony :-) Hated the constant whining, horrible, and I do mean horrible acting. Obviously this is the third installment of the Universal Soldier. The first one was the best. In this one the "soldiers" were fleeting and could have been shown a lot more than they were. Strange script. Totally unbelievable ending. These actors should never act again. This director should run for the hills. Several of the actors, male & female, would make a lot of money as strippers or such. I really don't understand why everyone always wants to make these crappy sequels. Totally off the wall.