Eye Candy #217 - "Universal Soldier Regeneration" (The Damme #11)

Universal Soldier Regeneration:  As Jean Claude Van Damme’s career continues to slowly circle the bowl, he revisits the “Universal Soldier” franchise, about technologically advanced warriors kept in cold storage.  Van Damme is back as Luc Devereaux (his character from the first two US movies he was in), a former Universal Soldier (or UniSol) trying to reacclimatize to normal civilian life, and it’s a bumpy road.  Meanwhile, terrorists kidnap the children of the Russian president and takeover the Chernobyl nuclear site, threatening to use explosives to uncap it and create a nuclear cloud.   And the terrorists have a brand-new prototype UniSol (called the NGU; played by MMA‘s Andrei Arlovski) at their disposal.  When several older generation UniSols fail to defeat the NGU, the UN reactivates Luc and sends him in.  Another wrinkle is that his old nemesis Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren, here in a largely thankless do-nothing role) has been cloned and is the terrorist ace-in-the-hole.  Directed by John Hyams, son of Peter Hyams (who is reported to have done some 2nd unit work here; he also directed Van Damme in arguably his best movie, “Timecop“, many moons ago), this is low-budget and by the numbers.  Van Damme and Lundgren both phone it in (and that’s saying something since both are supposed to be playing characters with limited emotional range to begin with), and Lundgren’s return to the franchise is underwhelming (he has maybe 5 minutes of screen time).  All I really came away with was, “Wow!  These guys look old!”  Some people are heralding this as the breath of life back in the franchise.  I disagree.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”