Like a stiff Schwarzeneggerian conqueror making good on an “I’ll be back,” Hyams returns to one-up the franchise again. (For one thing, Hyams all but stripped Regeneration of female roles, ducking any representational quagmires.) It was, and remains, a remarkable piece of contemporary action cinema, all the pummeled flesh and cartoony kinetic violence of the cinema of Zack Snyder without the meathead misogyny. He shunned the widescreen vistas of the original film for tight-framed dioramas chocked with bone-cracking close-quarters combat. Where Emmerich’s film (and its abysmal 1999 sequel) was marked by its sweep and scale, Hyams’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration was a brooding, adrenaline-injected chamber piece.
Then a withered property marked largely by direct-to-video spin-offs of Roland Emmerich’s original film, with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as KIA Vietnam War squad leaders brought back from the dead, brainwashed, and enrolled in a top-secret super-soldier program, Hyams jacked things up considerably. In 2009, when no one was looking, John Hyams up and revived Universal Soldier.
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