Universal Soldier: Regeneration (John Hyams, 2009)

The Russian President’s children have been kidnapped.

The group responsible have taken over a nuclear power station and plan to detonate a nuclear weapon if their ransom demands are not met.

When the army attacks, the group unveil their secret weapon - a new generation Universal soldier (Andrei Arlovski) who turns the military units into confetti.

WIth time running out, the authorities pressgang former UniSol Luc Deveraux (Jean Claude Van Damme) to infiltrate the station, kill the new UniSol, save the kids and turn off the bomb.

I am not a fan of the original Universal Soldier - it is dour, unimaginative and much worse than its stars’ other, smaller, pictures. When I was catching up on eighties and nineties action flicks, it stood out as one of the least entertaining. 

Released in 2009, after three other sequels, Universal Soldier: Regeneration was an unexpected triumph.

Made for US$ 9 million, Regeneration takes the same concept, strips it down and plays it out like a straight action movie. There are lashings of science fiction, but the focus is on brutal hand-to-hand combat.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration may be a sequel and a direct-to-video release, but it is a great example of why those labels should not be equated with poor filmmaking. Regeneration came out amid a wave of great DTV action fare, from Michael Jai White’s Blood and Bone to Isaac Florentine’s Undisputed III. 

Nowadays, the DTV market is thriving, thanks to stars like Michael Jai White and Scott Adkins, and filmmakers like Florentine, Jesse V. Johnson and John Hyams. 

The son of Peter Hyams, the director of Outland and Time Cop, John Hyams made his name on this picture. Most recently he made the move to theatrical releases with the 2020 thriller Alone. After watching Universal Soldier: Regeneration, you can see why he was able to make that jump.

A clean, straightforward genre flick filled with muddy, blood-soaked action, Regeneration is worth a watch, even if you have not seen the previous Universal Soldiers.

The first thing you notice watching it is that, despite its small budget, Regeneration never feels like it is straining in size.

The filmmakers pull off several impressive extended takes that show off the choreography, and help to immerse the viewer into the scene. 

The opening sequence in the museum feels like a dare to potential detractors, with widescreen compositions and extended takes which show off the location and the extras mulling around. Small details but they give the movie a sense of scope, and also set up the chaos which is about to follow.

There is such a sense of control to this sequence that when the tone shifts, as the museum trip turns into an ambush, it is genuinely shocking. 

The chase which follows is terrific, tense and dynamic. This movie was released amid the fallout of the Jason Bourne movies, but there is a judicious use of handheld camera that ensures we never lose a basic sense of geography.

All of the action sequences after this take place at the power plant - a result of the tight budget - but they are all great. The filmmakers have chosen a great location, and take the time to make sure to establish a rough sense of the recognisable features for the bloodshed which follows.

There are also a lot of shots with multiple planes of action going on - so many low-budget action films use the edit to get around their lack of scale, but this movie never resorts to that. The action is allowed to play out within the frame, and that sense of depth pays off in more dynamic and suspenseful set pieces.

As the film’s main threat, UFC fighter Andrei Arlovski is not required to do anything acting-wise, and he is perfect. He has great physical presence, and the decision to let the action play out means his talents are foregrounded. 

I have not watched UFC so I cannot comment on his style, but Arlovski is absolutely terrifying. He moves with speed and brute force, and the sound design makes sure you hear every bone-crunching moment of it. The character has a retractable spear in his arm, but Arlovski is so intimidating and dominant in his action sequences that it feels unnecessary. 

As far as the returning cast are concerned, Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren are fine. Regeneration does not waste time on rebuilding the franchise's mythology which works to the film’s benefit, but if you are expecting character development, the movie is not built upon it. 

Van Damme’s Luc has been trying to rehabilitate, but action calls, and he reverts to being a killing machine. It is a bit of a dangling thread, but the movie is paced so well I did not really care. 

It might be a weird form of the Kuleshov effect but Van Damme is frankly more interesting as a sawed-off killing machine. Even before he faces Arlovski, there is a weariness and haunted quality to Van Damme that makes the character feel more vulnerable - even when he is mowing through bad ‘uns, it feels like the character is barely holding it together. 

In contrast to his full throttle performance in the original, Lundgren is all understated menace. His appearance as the resurrected Andrew Scott feels the most like fan service in that it depends on viewers knowing who his character is for the tension to work, but - once again - the film does not waste time on a drawn-out heel turn. 

In its favor, Lundgren’s appearance does lead to a neat escalation of stakes for the third act, so it is not a pointless tangent.

There is not much more to Regeneration. It punches (and kicks) far above its weight, and it makes a solid entry point to the direct-to-video action genre.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: I Am The Night (TV, 2019)

In the mid-sixties, Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) , a young woman has come to Los Angeles to learn the secret of her birth. 

As Fauna digs deeper into her origins, she becomes entangled in another mystery - the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short...

Based on a pair of true stories, I Am The Night is a strange beast. 

It ends each episode with photographs of major characters, to remind the viewer that these people existed.

 

But most of the action in the story - the story itself - is mostly fictional.

I spent the miniseries engrossed but mystified by this decision. 

The Black Dahlia is one of the most famous unsolved mysteries - it is fodder for conspiracy theorists and storytellers. The problem is that the story has no resolution.

The story of Fauna Hodel is strange although less bleak than that of Elizabeth Short. 

The connections between the two are fascinating, but they do not make up enough of a story - at least for the makers of this miniseries.

What makes this story fascinating is how it ficitionalises a story from these components. 

I am not sure how I feel about it - this felt like a story that should have been fully fictionalized, but perhaps the filmmakers thought there were so many bizarre elements of the real story that it could only work if it was presented in the form of a docudrama.

This miniseries feels like it should be a feature film - at no point was I bored, but it does feel over-extended.

India Eisley is solid as Fauna and Jefferson Mays is urbane and alien as George Hodel, but perversely the most fascinating character is completely fictional - Jay Singletary played by Chris Pine.

Pine is an actor I have more time for the more I see of him. There is a world-weariness and fragility to his performance which underlies his initial braggadociousness. It is a terrific performance that ties the whole project together.

Ultimately, I Am The Night is not completely successful. But the story is strange enough to be compelling, and the performances - particularly Pine’s - give it a weight that it might not have otherwise had.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Presidio (Peter Hyams, 1988)

 When an MP is murdered in The Presidio military facility in San Francisco, police officer Jay Austin (Mark Harmon), a former MP, finds himself in charge of the investigation.

This puts him at odds with Lt. Col. Alan Caldwell (Sean Connery), his former boss. 

When evidence points towards members of the top brass, will the pair be able to put aside their differences to solve the case?

Movies are hard to make. They are made up of millions of decisions made by groups of filmmakers trying to create a singular vision. I think that is why I keep going back to the work of Peter Hyams. 

Every time I go in hoping for the best, and end up coming away with a consistent takeaway: Every Hyams movie has some great elements, but there is always something holding them back.

That being said, he can still put together a fun movie: Outland is terrific, and I enjoy his JCVD collaborations. I consider myself a Hyams apologist, but even when his pictures do not work, I find them interesting. 

Such is the case with The Presidio.

The premise is vaguely intriguing - a murder investigation on a military base sees jursidictional overlap between the military and the civilian police. The cop running the investigation is a former MP and his partner is his former chief as an MP. 

There are the bones for a solid thriller there, with the unique element of the MPs.

But after the initial set up, it feels like that context becomes less important, and the movie begins to feel more generic. There is a trail of clues, but the investigation never really comes into focus. And the mystery is ultimately not that interesting.  

I find a lot of genre movies falter with this - see The Batman - but this is a feature for The Presidio.

Because the movie also wants to be a relationship drama between the two warring cops. Not to sound repetitive but with this aspect of the story, the film feels underwritten. 

Part of the reason may be miscasting: The teaming of Sean Connery with Mark Harmon never works.

Connery is solid - it is a good role for him, as a stoic man who finally breaks down to finally expose his emotions. It is the one real arc in the movie that is purely built through his performance. 

Part of the performance’s power comes from it being Connery in the role. His persona is of emotional containment. His Bond was always cool under pressure, and a similar sense of emotional reticence runs through his work. It makes the moments when he does break down more powerful - he brings that history from previous roles.   

I could not get a fix on Mark Harmon. He has physical prowess during the action scenes but even then he never holds the screen. I was never fascinated by him, and it never felt like there was a character there, with a sense of history and inner life. 

To be frank, I do not think he has the charisma to match Connery, but I am also not willing to say that he was well-placed in this movie. According to trivia, Don Johnson was supposed to be the lead but dropped out last minute so Harmon was parachuted onto the production. 

Maybe if he had been involved earlier, and had time, his performance would be more specific, but as is, his portrayal of Jay Austin is a little flat.

It does not help that The Presidio also wants to be a love story between Jay and Alan’s daughter Donna (Meg Ryan). This subplot feels completely unnecessary - it is important in as far as it helps to define Connery, but that is about it.

The romance is established so quickly I thought the characters knew each other already. If Harmon and Ryan had dynamite chemistry, it might have worked but the way their relationship builds is so generic it felt like the movie had been made from an early treatment rather than a fleshed-out script.

I was expecting her to become a pawn in the mystery. I had read Roger Ebert’s review and he thought the same thing, but the movie had lulled me into the same line of thinking that I still thought she might end up in danger. 

As far as action, the movie features two chases and a gun fight in a factory. None of them are particularly interesting, and they are not staged or put together in a way that conveys energy or danger. 

Not as fun as his first collaboration with Connery, The Presidio is one of the blander efforts from Peter Hyams.

Related

Capricorn One

Outland

The Star Chamber

Running Scared

Time Cop

The Relic

End of Days

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Deep Murder (Nick Corirossi, 2018)

Originally I was going to review Deep Water, Adrian Lynne’s return to the erotic thriller. But that movie was so dull, I could not think of anything to write about. 

However, the title did remind me of this one, so thank you Deep Water. 

Written by Quinn Beswick,Josh Margolin and Benjamin Smolen, and directed by Nick Corirossi, 

Deep Murder starts out as a one joke premise, but like the joke that you repeat until it is funny again, Deep Murder is a weird kind of success.

In the middle of a softcore erotica, one of the characters (Jerry O’Connell) is murdered. It falls to a collection of familiar archetypes - the MILF (Katie Aselton), her nerdy son (Quinn Beswick), the babysitter (Jessica Parker Kennedy), the Jock (Chris Redd), the private detective (Josh Margolin) and… a scientist (Stephanie Drake) - to solve the mystery.

Shot with soft focus and with the fade of an old VHS, Deep Murder initially feels like a short.

But once the murder takes place, the fuzz goes away. That murder also acts as a catalyst for every character slowing discover another dimension (in their case, a second one).

The characters begin to develop an awareness of their limitations - the scientist realizes her skills are inadequate; the Babysitter wonders why there are no kids at this house she babysits at. 

This is where the film gets deeper - and also fumbles the ball a bit.

Deep Murder is super high concept and so the humor is super-specific. About midway through, as the characters began to evolve, it felt like the story was stronger than the laughs. A few of these arcs are great - the Babysitter’s evolution in the library is played completely straight, which makes her epiphany funnier - but it starts to feel a little too controlled. 

I found the third act of the film interesting from the way it wants to interrogate the genre, but it was not that funny, and not particularly satisfying dramatically. I admire the film’s attempt to craft a proper story, but in tying off the movie’s threads, it loses that sense of surprise. It is just not as weird, and it took some of the fun out of it for me.

There are some genre beats which feel ignored - the prime example is the Jock’s personal revelation that he is gay, which follows his fatal stabbing. For a movie about archetypes gaining depth, this subplot feels weirdly out of step with the film’s broader ambitions.

There is also one character who feels out of step with the others - I could not track the character of the Detective. He seems to be smarter and less predictable than everyone else, in a way built for easy laughs rather than maintaining the film’s inner logic.

The movie is not consistently laugh-out-loud, but the cast are game (Christopher McDonald pops in for a small role as an oblivious businessman) and the concept is great. 

Despite its flaws, Deep Murdser is just weird and specific enough to recommend watching at least once. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975)

 Following an economic collapse, the US has become a totalitarian state.

To placate the masses, the state has created a ghoulish spectacle to keep them distracted: Professional racers are pitted against each other in an annual race across the North American continent.

A group of rebels have hatched a plan to disrupt the race - a plan that involves returning winner Frankenstein (David Carradine)...

A Roger Corman production rushed out to compete with the big budget Rollerball, Death Race 2000 has arguably had a longer footprint on pop culture, with a 2008 remake (and three sequels) as well as Corman’s own sequel Death Race 2050.

Directed by Paul Bartel, who would later gain underground fame for the black comedy Eating Raoul, Death Race 2000 is a cheerful cheapie that is boosted by a thick vein of black humor. 

David Carradine is fine in the lead, but the scene stealer is Sylvester Stallone as his egotistical nemesis Machine Gun Joe. Stallone is hilarious and uninhibited in a way that his later fame probably negated.

The car chases are pretty rote, but Bartel riddles these sequences with great beats - the row of elderly hospice patients who are rolled out onto the road as potential points for the bloodthirsty drivers. There is also a neat running bit involving the government blaming the French for all their problems. 

While the satire on celebrity is broad, it is not without merit. This is a world where death is entertainment, and Bartel takes great delight in showing the media and Joe Public gorging on the violence. What makes it so effective is how de-sensitised everyone is: One news presenter takes every opportunity to claim intimacy with all the drivers, while the elder statesman journo who treats every event as a chance to recount some tangential historical context. 

The film even points the finger at audience. One particularly nasty punchline is the widow trembling with excitement that she is being interviewed. on TV.

Ironically, the movie feels like the inverse of its competition: while Rollerball features some fantastic action footage, with a well-developed fictional sport, its broader themes and satirical bent feel less developed. I enjoy Rollerball, but as a complete package, Death Race 2000 beats it clean.

Deliciously mordant, Death Race 2000 is a good time - and considering how the US is going, probably coming to the airwaves in 2025.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.