Yes, it's Warrior RoboKurt

If you have the sneaking suspicion that Soldier is an amalgam of The Road Warrior and Robocop -- with maybe a touch of The Terminator for good measure -- then you're ready to review for this site. (That is, as long as you're sure, deep in your heart, that Cameron's two best flicks remain the original Terminator and Aliens, which just happens to be the best sequel to any flick in any genre since The Godfather, Part II. If a certain big sinking ship came to mind instead, get the hell outta here!)

Anyway, Soldier kicks off with real promise, showing the futuristic evolutionary process of how a male infant grows up to become a killing machine. This kid, naturally, grows up to become Kurt Russell. Early on, there's a great "practice" fight on rope chains high overhead between Russell's character and two of his comrades against a newly engineered fighting automaton played by Jason Scott Lee that results in serious damage, including gouged-out eyes, etc. The movie becomes decidedly tame after this take-no-prisoners sequence.

The story plays out with Russell, replaced by higher-tech soldiers, being banished to a planet used as a garbage dump. He's believed to be dead, but he survives and discovers a small colony of humanistic scavengers on the planet. He's found by this group, nursed back to health and learns to cry.

Yeah, yeah -- okay. But where's the action? Well, there's a decent extended battle between Russell and a squad of the more highly engineered soldiers who have come to the planet in a training exercise. Of course, Russell takes 'em down in high style, and then he goes one-on-one with Lee's depth-of-vision-impaired soldier.

This could have been a better guilty pleasure non-stop action flick if there had been less emphasis on, and exploration of, Russell's feminine side. Screenwriter David Webb Peoples should've realized he wasn't making a sci-fi action Unforgiven (admittedly, a fine film he wrote with Clint Eastwood); character nuance ain't key here, and it only muddles the movie. Director Paul Anderson (Event Horizon) isn't the most graceful of action directors, either.

All that said, Soldier is still a lot more fun to sit through than Beloved.

- The Raving Reviewer