Universal Squadrons is an almost passable low budget flick until it flies apart at the end like rickety outhouse in a tornado. It's got a couple of attractive leads who, believe it or not, can act. It's got enough visual imagination to largely overcome its obvious budget limitations. It's got a legitimately surprising twist. And it's got a story that flirts with being about more than empty entertainment. Unfortunately, it's also got terrible pacing, an inability to generate any dramatic momentum, its twist leads nowhere and the story never does more than flirt with meaning. Then there's the ending, where the film descends into a whole new sub-level of terrible and wraps up like this thing was intended to be the pilot episode of a new series on the SyFy channel.
Lance Deakins (Riley Smith) is a soldier assigned to a forgotten supply depot in Iraq who spends most of his time playing a first-person-shooter PC game with his three buddies. When he returns home to his Texas ranch and his beautiful girlfriend (Willa Ford), Lance begins to suffer from bizarre flashbacks and violent outbursts that seem connected to that video game. While the movie eventually reveals the secret behind Lance's problems, it never quite explains what the deal is with the video game. It constantly goes back to the game play but never ties it into the government experiment conducted on Lance in any real way. Anyway, as the main villain (who morphs from good guy to bad guy and back so often I think even the makers of Universal Squadrons lost track) drives off with Lance's girlfriend in what could be either a rescue or a kidnapping, Lance has to square off against another experimental soldier in a super-speed battle that finishes with the other solider turning into the dumbest man alive.
This is not a good motion picture. It doesn't even qualify as okay or average. Universal Squadrons is fairly bad. Most films this bad, though, tend to stink all the way through. I mean, the writing will suck, the direction will suck, the acting will suck. There will be this uniformity of inferior filmmaking. However, quite a bit of this film is better than okay or average. Riley Smith and Willa Ford are both pretty good and Barry Corbin is good with no qualifiers. They don't have any snazzy dialog or complex motivations to play with, but they all come off like legitimate actors giving legitimate performances. You don't often get that with this strata of cinema. The super-speed effects here are also impressive, given how little money was clearly poured into this production. The editing on the flashback/delusion sequences is quite sharp and there's a scene involving waterskiing on sand that it a surprisingly effective bit of character depth.
Those peaks are outnumbered by the valleys in this movie and the whole shebang plunges off a cliff and falls a thousand feet to its death at the end. Co-writer/director Mark Millhone shows absolutely no sense of rhythm or structure and far too many scenes are just limp on the screen, both visually and narratively. The thematic and emotional conflict is too repetitive and, as previously mentioned, Millhone loses any handle on whether the villain of the story is actually a villain at all. The mystery of Lance's condition is detailed in 35 seconds of exposition and then there's that ending. Oh, goodness, it's nonsense in almost every way. Logically. Logistically. Dramatically. The previously interesting special effects even lose their luster after a time. The final 10 to 15 minutes of Universal Squadrons is so much worse than even the other bad parts of the film that it's like a different and far less capable person was brought in to write and shoot those scenes.
You don't need to see this movie. If you find something else with either Riley Smith or Willa Ford in it, you might want to give it a try.
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