Universal Squadrons (2011) Reviews

• worth the rental.

  garycbelleville2012-09-13

  I guess I want to agree with pretty much everything MBunge from Waterloo, Iowa wrote in his/her review. (sorry Not sure about gender just by screen name) The first thing I did when it was over was to go online to see if maybe there was a series coming this season along the line of this movie. I really mistook it for a pilot for a new series. Tell you the truth I would like to see it done too. Yeah sure I gave it a 4 but for me thats not a really a bad thing cause for me 5 is Good anything about means beyond good and slightly below doesn't mean it sucked, of course a 1 would say that but I didn't give it a 1. I enjoyed the Story, I enjoyed the acting and actors,I enjoyed most of the script, the flashbacks were not that much of a problem but there was something about how this movie looked that I just couldn't believe it actually cost 3 million. I mean even if they had grade A actors and so it felt like a very low b film. Anyhow , I don't feel as though I wasted my time nor money but I wouldn't push to be in the front of the line to see it either. Finally ,to anybody and everybody involved in this movie well...Thanks you

• UNIVERSAL BORE

  nogodnomasters2018-12-08

  Lance (Riley Smith) is playing a video game called "Minuteman" with 3 fellow soldiers. The game is similar to "Doom." When Lance frags his buddies in the game, they die in their chairs. He returns home to his ranch, girlfriend (Willa Ford) and unemotional father who is in a wheel chair. He discovers his ranch has been run into the ground and the bank is ready to foreclose. Meanwhile, he has flashbacks to various aspects of the game and Iraq. When a ranch hand (David Born) gets his hand caught, Lance runs at super-human speed to save him. He doesn't remember how he moved that fast. During this early scene we discover two things: 1) someone is watching him and 2) the special effects are about the same as the "6 Million Dollar Man" and we don't get the cool background bionic noise to go with the motions. Lance "zones out" and goes into rages, like the Hulk, with severe anger management issues. The plot is weak. Low budget, not worth the view. F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

• Intense

  cbell-139172018-10-05

  Loved this promo. Great cast! Christian Kane as peacemaker is Awesome. Such emotion and intensity

• Not consistently bad

  MBunge2012-05-25

  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.

• Universal Squadrons is under-rated for what it is.

  boyerman20012012-05-24

  You see a lot of 'time-warp' movies out now-days but unlike those this one only carries one special effect, the fast zoom. Compared to most movies that try using this effect, you can actually make out the colors of their clothes (or at least I could). Yes this movie had a lot of flashbacks based on the game (which he doesn't remember) but it does keep your mind thinking on what is reality and what is a flashback. I will not say this is a 10/10 cause they could of brought it to a 2hr hour movie, which now days is average, but it could of brought more story on his team and the experiment, rather than just the quick bits flashed in our faces.