Universal Soldier: Regeneration (John Hyams, 2010)

John Hyams' Universal Soldier: Regeneration, the third official installment of the Universal Soldier series and fifth overall, was released ignominiously direct-to-video in the United States and Europe and got only the softest theatrical release anywhere else. Yet this quietly dumped sequel to a long-forgotten franchise, made for a paltry $14 million, displays a better grasp of 1980s action filmmaking and more visceral pleasure than just about anything to come out of America in a long, long time. And even if it did not meet this level of quality, how many direct-to-DVD cash-ins also contain credible aesthetic and thematic nods to John Carpenter and Blade Runner?

Opening starkly on a young woman's face as Hyams' camera gently glides with her through a museum, Universal Soldier: Regeneration has just enough time to recall John Carpenter with its 'Scope-framed tracking shot before the rug gets pulled out from under the film and all hell breaks loose. As this girl and her brother, the children of Russia's prime minister, head out with their escort to return home, a reinforced SUV pulls out of nowhere and slams into their vehicle, killing a bodyguard as armed terrorists leap out and abduct the children. An ensuing car chase is an object lesson in how to start an action film: all chaotic but carefully ordered cuts of traded machine gunfire and sudden swerves as civilian cars suddenly stumbling into this fracas cause problems for police and abductor alike and require swift visual recalibration to deal with these new objects.

That sequence contains more than its share of decidedly un-'80s camera movements and editing, yet the problem with the contemporary trend of handheld, visceral action has never been its use but its overuse. Judicious shot patterns help clarify this and other action showcases in the film while still intentionally disorienting the viewer. The constant entrance and exit of other cars in this early scene serves to constantly upend the action but also displays a carefully choreographed stunt rather than a haphazard maelstrom of movement.

Even so, what makes a more memorable impression are those aforementioned moments of Carpenterian camerawork that meshes the dulled metal color palette to create an unexpected sense of melancholy. Hyams then parlays this mood into an elegiac view of the film's returning action superstars, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. JCVD returns as UniSol Luc Devereux, now old and weary and, as is the fate of all once-revolutionary technology, grown obsolete. Called into action when a rogue scientist helps Russian terrorists unleash a next-generation universal soldier capable of tearing through the old models like paper, Luc finds himself caught between involuntary inactivity in his rehabilitation from a life of war to his outclassed status on the battlefield he returns to with equal reluctance.

Lundgren makes an even bigger impression with a fraction of the screen time. Playing a cloned version of the psychopath Andrew Scott, Lundgren downplays his genetic copy's mental instability for existential angst. Rather than a mindlessly violent killing machine, Lundgren's Scott asks questions so lofty they sound rhetorical until he acts out aggressively when no one can answer him. Lundgren's vague musings and almost tragic inability to think of anything other than his own existence recall Rutger Hauer's performance as a dying Replicant in Blade Runner. There are even similarities in action—Lundgren dispatches his "father" in the same manner Hauer vents his fears and anger on his creator. When JCVD and Lundgren finally get to fight, both seem so enveloped in their own regrets that the other person serves more as an interruption of their own pain than a nemesis.

By actually engaging with the realities of its stars' aging, Universal Soldier: Regeneration finds ways to  update well-worn material while also having fun with old forms. As intriguing as its character development is, Regeneration never flags as an action film. Blunt, forward-motion direction reflects the juggernaut intensity of Andrei Arlovski's unnamed next-gen engineered soldier, while JCVD's more nuanced tactics get the carefully organized shots to match. His tear through the bad guys' compound at Chernobyl in the climax operates through a simple but balletic entwining of action and camera movement, with the camera gliding around with Luc as he knifes a terrorist and constantly shifts his hiding spots to wait for the screams to draw the next hapless victim (and piece of bait). These days, such spare, effective technique in an action movie is as beguiling the deep pondering of people (or clones) in same.

Dragon Eyes

If there is any justice in this world, John Hyams will not have to suffer in his direct-to-DVD or VOD-first-release purgatory for much longer. Dragon Eyes, which creeped onto VOD without fanfare earlier this year, lacks the same physical and emotional grace as Hyams' last film, Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Made in-between that film and its upcoming sequel (due on VOD in October, though with a theatrical release of some sort(!) planned later), Dragon Eyes feels altogether rougher around the edges, with more brutish direction, stodgier writing and a few flashy visual gimmicks that Hyams himself says were not his doing.

Even so, Hyams' filler is a high-concept piece, a loose retelling of Yojimbo set among American gangs that trades samurai skills for MMA combat. MMA fighter Cung Le stars as Hong, a mysterious individual who shows up in the gang-run town of St. Jude and promptly begins kicking everyone's ass until he manages to anger even the corrupt police chief who controls everything, Mr. V (Peter Weller). Flashbacks to Hong's training in prison under mentor Tiano (Jean-Claude Van Damme) break up Hong's rampages with martial arts philosophizing, and a few extra kicks for good measure. Other flashbacks providing Hong's backstory manage to be even more clichéd, mostly silent interludes that gradually piece together what sent the man to jail in the first place.

So, yes, nothing in Dragon Eyes has the unexpected gravitas of Dolph Lundgren's grasping regret in Regeneration, but as a straight-ahead action movie, Hyams is still a director to watch. He loves his big, open spaces, making even Tiano's cell back in the prison large enough to almost seem cozy. The confrontation that closes the second act occurs in a darkened warehouse that seems to stretch into inky blackness so deep the area almost recalls the matte-painted infinity of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Over time, even the excessive color grading—which washes sunny exteriors in spray-tanned bronze and Mr. V's seedy deals in avaricious green—come to fit their settings.

But the real draw is, of course, the action, which Hyams continues to film in such a way as to elicit thoughts of the genre's 1980s heyday even as he puts his own imprint on the genre. Hyams' sequences do not lack the rapid-fire editing and hand-held, close-up framing that defines so much action filmmaking today. He merely uses the technique as punctuation, not the whole damn sentence. This allows Hyams to use "chaos cinema" flourishes as they are intended, to provide real-time flow between thought, action and result that can actually make a fight more fluid, not less. One slick movie—Hong disarming one thug, ejecting the clip and throwing the empty gun at another—is performed so swiftly that its comic principles take an additional second to catch up to what happened, yet the smaller movements performed in his maneuver are clearly shot enough to give the joke the clarity it needs to be funny at all. On the flip side, Hyams also includes an extended take Steadicam sequence that serves as a reminder of his capable skills as a choreographer.

Dragon Eyes betrays its DTV financing and lowered expectations in a way that Regeneration never did, yet such phenomenal action staging continues to stretch the boundaries and assumed worth of that format. In fact, though this is the lesser film of Hyams' last two efforts, it may be better at demonstrating the kind of spontaneity and low-scale creative freedom DTV, VOD and the like could afford genre filmmakers who don't need $100 million worth of effects to cover up their mediocrity. Nevertheless, it is hard not to imagine what Hyams might do if he actually got his hands on a $50 million budget, rather than making movies that look like he received $50 million instead of 10-15.