Neil Young's Film Lounge

REVIVAL OF THE FITTEST : John Hyams’ ‘Universal Soldier – Regeneration’ [6/10]

Few recent film-reviews can have whetted readers’ appetites quite as sharply as the five-star rave posted on Ain’t It Cool News by Seattle’s uni-monikered Vern after he saw Universal Soldier – Regeneration, latest entry in an intermittent cycle started back in 1992 by no less an eminence than Roland Emmerich. But while the picture is indeed a cut above the usual run of straight-to-DVD, it’s not so amazing that it cries out for worldwide cinematic release.
   Imaginatively shot, edited and scored (with ambitious touches of Tarkovsky and Cronenberg amid the mayhem) this gleefully violent affair is certainly an impressive calling-card for John Hyams – son of Peter (Capricorn Run, 2010, etc), who here provides sterling service as his lad’s DP. 
   Hyams Jr, whose sole previous narrative feature was 1997′s little-seen One Dog Day, classily transcends his reported $14m budget in a manner which suggests he’ll be dealing with projects of several times that magnitude sooner rather than later (from the very first sequence – almost from the very first image - it’s clear we’re in safe hands.)
  But there’s only so much even Hyams can do with a decidedly two-dimensional script – credited to ‘Victor Ostrovsky’ (no previous credits; may be a pseudonym) – in which post-Soviet separatists kidnap the children of the Russian PM and threaten to detonate the radioactive remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power-plant.
   This is all just an elaborate pretext, of course, for various sides to unleash their not-so-secret weapons: augmented undead/near-immortal super-warriors known as ‘universal soldiers.’ These include Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) from the earlier pictures in the series, the former enjoying much more screen-time than the latter.
   This time they’re up against a fearsome ‘new generation’ Uni-Sol, a nameless giant played by MMA star Andrei “The Pit Bull” Arlovski – who’s reportedly 6’4″ but looks at least a foot taller here (watch how he has to dip his head when walking through doorways and beneath low ceilings.)
   Arlovski, while top-billed, barely registers as a character - as with so much of Universal Soldier Regeneration, his contributions owe more to ultra-violent video-games than to cinema. Surprisingly, veteran action-genre legends Van Damme and Lundgren don’t get that more to chew on, apart from a couple of impressively slam-bang wall-smashing fight sequences.
   And with the intriguing 21st-century-dehumanisation-of-humanity subtexts (battlefield and beyond) frustratingly unexplored, it’s left to supporting players Emily Joyce (as Devereaux’s therapist) and Mike Pyle (an American non-universal soldier) to provide fleeting grace-notes of texture and depth. 
   Like Arlovski, Pyle – whose billing here notably doesn’t include his nom du cage “Quicksand” - is an eminence in the world of MMA, and it’s rather surprising to learn that this is his first stab at acting. If the final scene is any guide, it may well, encouragingly, by no means be his last.

Neil Young
6th  April, 2010

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER – REGENERATION : [6/10]
John HYAMS : US 2009 : 93m (BBFC - DVD) : {16/28}
seen on DVD, Sunderland, 5th April 2010