Hall of Fame: Andrew Scott
It’s tough out there being a bad guy in the action genre. Rarely does it ever end the way you want it to. Most times, those damned heroes kill the villain in the finale or at the very least, send them to prison. Think about the last time a villain made it through multiple movies? You’ll have to exclude superhero flicks and anything made to be a trilogy like The Hunger Games. It’s not an easy thing to do. I’m saying all of this to help strengthen my case that Andrew Scott is one of the most underappreciated villains of the past 30 years. Do you hear me?
The ballad of Andrew Scott starts in 1969. He’s a non-commissioned officer fighting a brutal and unpopular war half a world away. We’re introduced to him during a fit of rage in which he has killed a number of his own men along with quite a few Vietnamese civilians. The heroic and totally American Luc Deveraux (Van Damme) confronts his NCO and they end up killing each other in a Tarantino-esque fashion.
The next time we meet Scott and Deveraux they’re not who they once were. It’s no longer the decade of love and HIV-less sex. It’s the 90’s now and everyone is wearing combat boots, listening to Nirvana, and recovering from another war in a distant land. GR-13 and GR-44 are two emotionless robots, doling out the punishment to bad guys and taking really cold naps together.
Lundgren’s GR-13 is the best thing about Universal Soldier. He’s a maniac, no doubt, but he also has a reason why he’s so crazy and pissed off. Somehow, someway, he and Luc’s bodies were stowed away for over twenty years while the UniSol program got underway and now they’re walking around as reanimated GI Joes. I would be a little fussy about the situation, too!
Scott and Deveraux fall back into their proper roles as villain and hero during the first film all culminating in a kickass finale that sees the two of them having a great barnyard brawl with Scott being sucked into a wood chipper. Bummer….but just when you expected the guy who was already killed twice to be dead, he surprises us all by reappearing 25+ years later looking like the same old badass.
2009’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration brought the band all back together. It might have been 20 years later than it should have been, but just like that AC/DC concert I saw in ’98, the boys still know how to rock it. Director John Hyams took over the reins of the franchise with this one and found the only way possible to bring Andrew Scott back; cloning baybay!
Everyone had pretty well forgotten about the turd that was Universal Soldier: The Return and Regeneration was about as far from that P.O.S. as you could get. It replaced the laughs and hijinks with uber violence and fist fights so brutal Kimbo Slice would run home crying to his mama. Scott would play a secondary role as what I like to call “the mini-boss”. He’s a clone of the original but made anew, with the new NGU program. You know that Hyams wasn’t going to bring Scott back without having him and Deveraux mix it up again but the fight this time is extremely up close and personal. It’s one you need to see.
Now one might think that a man who has already died three times in a franchise should just stay away. His role in Regeneration was much smaller than the original and Dolph wasn’t getting any younger. You could also say that Andrew Scott had lost a step or two as a character and he didn’t have the same aura to him. What on Earth could they do to bring him back this time?
Aw shit! Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning was a whirlwind for the franchise and what some consider to be the best of the series. Not me, I might add, but I could see how some might think that it was just based on how crazy and different it was to its predecessors. The film would see action star Scott Adkins take over the lead role as a man in search of the killer of his family. What makes it even wilder is that the killers he’s in search of are led by none other than Luc Deveraux. I told you it was weird.
Deveraux is now the head of the Unisol Church of Eventualism. It sounds weird because it is. The direction of the franchise totally shifts during Day of Reckoning and not even Andrew Scott is unscathed. Sure, Van Damme’s Deveraux is now bald, totally crazy in a Colonel Kurtz sort of way, and painting his face like an Apache warrior, but at least he has some sort of arc. Scott has now become a fixture of the franchise instead of a major player. It’s been nice to see him back a couple of times but when do you say “enough is enough”? Not everything in Day of Reckoning is what it seems and maybe that is where it lost me. A franchise that was built on that good vs. evil action all of a sudden had something to say. I hope you’re listening.
I hear a lot about our veterans coming back and how we need to support them. I’m one myself, and while I never experienced the same trauma that Andrew Scott experienced I can relate to certain feelings of abandonment that he has. Great villains not only entertain you with their schemes, evil deeds, and ill intensions. They also add doubt to your own mind as to whether or not what they’re doing is completely wrong. Andrew Scott did many bad things over the course of his three outing in the Universal Soldier franchise but he wasn’t exactly given the greatest of care. Vietnam turned him into a monster and then the American Government gave him the tools to take his killer mentality to the next level. I can’t fault him for being a murdering bastard. That’s what he was made to be. All I CAN do is what I know best….and that is putting this murdering bastard in the Bulletproof Action Hall of Fame. Congratulations Andrew!
