Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)

Film Title: Universal Soldier: Regeneration
Also known as: Universal Soldier: A New Beginning (Japan)
Released: October 1, 2009 (Austin Fantastic Fest)
Directed by: John Hyams

Written by: Victor Ostrovsky based on characters created by Dean Devlin, Christopher Leitch & Richard Rothstein

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren & Andrei Arlovski

Plot: A group of terrorists, who have gained control of a next-generation Universal Soldier, have taken hostages inside the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Officials have call Luc Deveraux, one of the original UniSols, back into action to save the day.

IMDb: 5.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: No score
My Score: 3/5

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Universal Soldier: Regeneration, known in Japan and Malaysia as A New Beginning, may be the fifth installment in the Universal Soldier franchise but is the first since the original film to be considered canon. A terrorist group has gotten their hands on an NGU (Andrei Arlovski), or Next-Generation UniSol, and have used him to kidnap the teenage children of the Ukranian prime minister. Holding the kids in the dilapidated Chernobyl nuclear reactor, they set up a series of explosives that, if detonated, would release a catastrophic radiation cloud. US troops team up with the Ukranian military to take down the bad guys but are decimated by the NGU. The only solution is to bring Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) back into service. He's been living in Switzerland for years undergoing rehabilitation therapy with Dr. Fleming (Emily Joyce), who is trying to reintroduce him back into society. Regeneration, while it has some serious flaws, the lackluster script in particular, attempts to make up for many of them with some with some intense and brutal fight sequences, which really are the highlights of the film. The result is the best Universal Soldier film so far, in my opinion. There is some action in the first two thirds of the film but it is mostly mediocre. The opening kidnapping sequence is pretty good but its a car chase, not a fight. There are four Gen-1 UniSols sent in to take down Arlovski towards the beginning but only one actually puts up any sizable resistance, and it's not even John Foo, who is one of the other four! Things don't really heat up until Van Damme is let loose but that doesn't happen until the final thirty minutes of the film. But what a half an hour it is! The fight between Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren (who was literally shredded to pieces in the first film but returns here as a clone) is ten times better than any of their confrontations in the original. They put each other through concrete walls, down flights of stairs and ultimately out a five story window to the ground below. Needless to say they both end up really taking a beating. The fight between Arlovski and Mike Pyle, who is a human army captain in the film, is clearly indicative of their mixed martial arts backrounds, both men having fought in the UFC as well as other MMA promotions. And the final fight between Van Damme and Arlovski is the first time in the film that Arlovski is really given a challenge. There's no denying that this is a piece of action fluff but anyone looking for depth in a Universal Soldier movie is just kidding themselves. You don't come to the franchise for answers to the deep questions, you come for the action, which Regeneration ends up delivering, literally, in the end. Directed by John Hyams, his father, Peter Hyams, who directed Van Damme in the films Timecop and Sudden Death, serves as director of photography.