I have no issues with fading action stars taking long dormant franchises out of mothballs to jump-start their flagging box-office fortunes.
It's, after all, given us the slightly under-whelming but entertaining Indy 4, the poignant Rocky 6, the visceral Rambo 4 and kinetic Live Free or Die Hard.
And now we have Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, doyens of low-rent actioners for much of the late '80s to mid-'90s cinema( currently doyens of low-rent actioners released directly to DVD) saddling up for a rematch of their burly barnyard brawl in the Roland Emmerich-directed 1990 action hit Universal Soldier.
But fans expecting Regeneration to be the vehicle that finally hauls these ageing Euro Hunks out of the murky depths of DVD Dungeon should check their expectations at the door.
It takes a full hour for Van Damme to swing into action and Lundgren's appearance amounts to little more than a cameo.
As for the much anticipated, hyped and awaited Dolph-Damme rematch?
It's pulverisingly brutal stuff...for all of the 2 minutes it lasts.
The plot, for those that actually need one, is about a disposed Russian general and his army who kidnap the children of the Soviet Premier and hold them captive at the abandoned Chernobyl Nuclear plant (yes, that Chernobyl), threatening to both kill his hostages and unleash a nuclear Holocaust if his political allies aren't released from prison.
The US army is called in to help (big surprise), and they come with an elite cadre of fighting fit men, including 4 UniSols i.e Universal Soldiers; regenerated former corpses tweaked and honed to near indestructible fighting capability.
But their first incursion into the plant for a rescue mission is soundly thwarted, courtesy of the baddies' Secret Weapon: A souped-up UniSol Ver.2 (UFC alumni Sergei "The Pit Bull" Arlovski, displaying the personality of a lamp-post but a brutally efficient fighter), created and maintained by a defecting and mercenary scientist who also has his own "Insurance Policy" against the rebel general, a re-cloned former UniSol Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren).
With a sizeable chunk of their force massacred not to mention their UniSols permanently decommissioned, the military authorities yank their last surviving UniSol Luc Devereaux (Van Damme) out of retirement and some cosy rehabilitation therapy in Switzerland to take out the bad guys.
The filmmaker's decision to ignore events in the second film may sit well with those who feel every available copy of Universal Soldier:The Return needs to be hunted down and burnt along with the original negatives, but as one of the 10 people on the planet who genuinely enjoyed it's absurd cheesiness, Regeneration seems dark and dour by comparison, thanks to a spare, minimalist approach taken by director John (son of Peter) Hyams that echoes the John Carpenter actioners of the '80s like "Escape From New York" complete with a thumping electronica score. It works for the script's sombre mood and complements the fast, furious and effective action set pieces.
But the drawback is you get a Devereaux leeched of much of his humanity (which, after all, was an underlying theme of the first 2 flicks), Van Damme's natural charisma buried beneath a perpetually sullen demeanour that tends to give credence to rumours that he was strong-armed into the role owing to contractual requirements.
And shoe-horning a 10min Lundgren cameo just to insert him into a fleeting fight scene with Van Damme is Fan Bait of the worst kind. But kudos to Drago for investing his all too brief screen time with a delicious reprise of his unhinged soldier, An Andrew Scott re-cloned complete with his homicidal psychosis intact, and more's the pity he didn't get to pull Chief Baddie duties.
For action junkies, Universal Soldier 3 is definitely worth a spin on their players, thanks to Hyams' slick choreography of the action scenes. The fights, executed for the most part by genuine exponents, is thankfully free of much of the hyper-edits and shaky-cam effects that litter action movies nowadays. One hack-and-slash scene featuring a Van Damme on Berserker Mode armed with a Hunting Knife is especially cool. The Pit Bull lays on some lightning fast combos of kicks and punches (but I still miss the hamming Bill Goldberg and the panther-like grace of Michael Jai White from The Return) while the Van Damme-Lundgren bout features some of the best property-destroying mayhem since The Bride and Elle Driver ripped apart a trailer in Kill Bill 2.
The ending blatantly sets up another installment that from the looks of it will star one of the American soldiers (also played by a martial artist whose name I can't be arsed to look up) killed in action and all set to be resurrected as a UniSol.
I'm not looking forward to it.
Put the UniSols back on ice. This franchise is done.
