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Universal Soldier: Regeneration

Universal Soldier: Regeneration

2009
Drama
Sci-fi
1h 37m
The militant Islamist Chechen Basayev abducts the children of the President and takes control of Chernobyl, threatening to unleash a radioactive cloud unless his demands are met. Luc Deveraux (Van Damme), now an Universal Soldier again, joins a new team of UniSols secretly held in deep storage. Their mission: retake Chernobyl and disable explosives that will unleash radioactive clouds. Luc discovers that one of the reactivated Universal Soldiers is a clone of his old, homicidal Sergeant, Andrew (Wikipedia)
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Universal Soldier: Regeneration

2009
Drama
Sci-fi
1h 37m
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Avg Percentile 34.04% from 346 total ratings

Ratings & Reviews

(346)
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Rated 02 May 2014
73
64th
Discovering that there's a Universal Soldier movie that's not only not shitty but actually pretty goddamn good is.. is.. Hm, hard to describe. It's like finding that carton of milk in the back of your fridge and it hasn't expired yet. It's like seeing that attractive girl wink at you but before realising she just had something in her eye. It's like finding that Euro coin on the ground after a night of dry-heaving in some stranger's bathroom. ..Hm, my standards of quality might be too low though.
Rated 15 Feb 2010
70
53rd
Every other person in this movie gets killed by being punched in the face a dozen times REALLLLLY hard.
Rated 04 Sep 2014
90
82nd
The best zombie movie since Shaun of the Dead. Incredibly cool, clearly shot, vicious action and haunted, world-weary performances from JCVD and Lungdren.
Rated 18 Jan 2010
48
47th
Good. The muscle from Brussels is back to kick more super-soldier ass. The setting is Chernobyl, very grimy and desolate, there are no John Woo/MTV style rapid-edit action sequences. The fight sequences are brutally detailed and very effective. The plot may be flimsy but the action isn't and that's what we care about in a JCVD film. An excellent time waster. Recommended.
Rated 03 May 2016
74
77th
A terrorist/separatist conspiracy involving the takeover of Chernobyl and the kidnapping of the Russian President's daughter and son. Their weapon is a new UniSol (Arlovski). Luc has just spent two years in rehab, but is sadly reactivated. The scientist activates an Andrew clone. And now all we get is a nuclear ruin serving as a battefield for three UniSols. Clear, beautifully coreographed action and the intelligent use of empty, generic spaces makes the case for a pure, grim DTV actioner.
Rated 22 Dec 2013
4
70th
What the hell, how is this movie so randomly great? Direct-to-video JCVD sequels are not supposed to be excellent. It's gritty, no-nonsense, and action-packed, combining brutal unflinching violence with the humanist sci-fi approach of Blade Runner and the Terminator films. A shocking success on all counts.
Rated 26 Feb 2010
62
38th
Has a moment or two and a nice gritty look to it but this is nothing more than another forgettable DTV action sequel.
Rated 12 Aug 2021
85
29th
Terrorists threaten with bombs to blow up Chernobyl's nuclear reactor, which could cost thousands of lives. A team of soldiers is sent to stop this, but they are in for a big surprise: a new, deadlier UniSol in the form Andrei Arlovski. The only one who can stop the terrorists now is Luc Deveraux (JeanClaude van Damme), a Universal Soldier from the very beginning. This killing machine is doing well, until it comes up against a surprise. It turns out that another UniSol has been secretly brought.
Rated 06 Feb 2022
75
52nd
Ten years earlier, the previous installment marked the beginning of over a decade of Van Damme being damned to straight-to-dvd action movies, not that he was ever much of an a-lister anyway. While it may be completely miraculous and unbelievable, this fifth installment might actually be the best outing for Universal Soldier ever. The fights are visceral and brutal, the story is lean and straight forward, Van Damme, surprisingly, kept up his chops, and Lundgren is back.
Rated 27 Jul 2020
8
85th
Of the two Hyams films, this one aims lower but hits right on the mark. It dispenses with the original's dreadful attempts at humor and looks and feels exactly how a film with this essentially dystopian premise should. The film smartly saves Van Damme and Lundgren for the final half hour, trusting the solid supporting cast to carry the first hour on their own, and giving Van Damme's deployment more weight when it finally occurs. All-in-all, shockingly good for a DTV sequel to a garbage film.
Rated 03 Feb 2010
65
37th
This DTV third installment featuring the Van Damme character removes the humor and fun of the original and goes for excessively dark, gritty, serious and bloody. With very strong production values for a DTV film, it's a shame to see Van Damme and Lundgren reduced to glorified cameos. The story isn't awful, but this series is about their characters, and this movie spends more than half its length away from them. Lundgren gets only ten or so minutes. Too bad. 'Regeneration' could've been a kick.
Rated 02 Feb 2014
45
34th
Low-budget but medium-ambitious, this kind of thematises the convergence of biotechnology and the military, with a distinct absence of good guys, and it is filmed with a certain amount of style and skill, including movie references and some lengthy action shots that are fairly impressive if often bloodthirsty. In the end, however, one really has to be a fan of extended fight sequences for this film to be considered entertaining, since they take up such a large proportion of the running time.
Rated 02 Jan 2010
73
50th
It's Dolph and Van Damme in Chernobyl, sounds good and mostly is. Decent action and reasonable fight scenes. But they did not play the Dolph card anywhere near as well as they could have. Interesting scenery anyway and unfortunately a dumb ending.
Rated 21 Aug 2011
40
14th
Again I encounter a film which, in hindsight, has a sound idea to it - let's delete the second film with Bill Goldberg out of cannon, and transform the goofy Roland Emmerich film into a deathly serious sequel. Sadly the film immediately showed itself to be dour without any sense of meaning - just the visual palette, overbearingly grim without a justification for it, becomes a chore to sit through - and leads to pointless and horrible violence without reason to it.
Rated 16 Mar 2010
60
30th
The cinematography is surprisingly good with top notch action sequences. The action looks high budget but that's about where the good qualities end. The storyline is ridiculous and the writing is very poor which is not surprising given the subject matter. Van Damme and Lundgren have few scenes together in this and barely speak at all. Overall it's not good but it's entertaining enough if you want some gritty video game like violence. It's better than some much higher budget movies.
Rated 04 Apr 2010
70
49th
Great Non-stop Action. I expected crap, but got a nice B-Movie instead.
Rated 21 Dec 2014
3
30th
it is definitely aesthetically more accomplished, with well-choreographed fight scenes, and perhaps there are themes of biotechnology and agency bubbling below the surface. best aspect is probably the soundtrack. however, this is also pretty much militaristic video game nonsense, complete with a final showdown between three skynet bosses. pick your player!
Rated 25 Aug 2010
55
39th
Jean-Claude and Dolph look pretty spent in this. It has some decent action, a more elaborate plot than the original (okay, it's hard not to) and John Hyams' take on the franchise strips away the silliness in favour of realism. The movie is way better than it has any right to be. While I wouldn't exactly recommend it, it's worth checking out. Then again, I would expect nothing less from the son of the director of 'Timecop'. Bring on the next one.
Rated 12 May 2010
44
43rd
Worth a watch
Rated 02 Jan 2014
66
45th
I found myself mostly impressed by John Hyams' willingness to shoot Van Damme and Lundgren at their real age, lines and all. He imbues the film with a visceral frankness that heightens the PTSD allegory. I just wish it didn't take so long to move past the predictable scènes à faire and get to the parts that set this film apart.
Rated 17 Jan 2014
2
13th
Nobody cares about the acting or writing in this movie, so let's just get straight to the "good" stuff, which is the action, right? Well, from my perspective, yes and no, but mostly no. At first the cold as ice Soviet Union style atmosphere works, but once you've seen one brutal killing, you've mostly seen 'em all, and the unabashed violence and seriousness wears thin. Not to mention, JCVD's role barely takes off until the halfway point, and Lundgren is in it for what, 10 minutes? Not my bag.
Rated 28 Oct 2012
65
31st
Far superior to the original. Although the plot is fairly generic, the execution is on par with much larger budgeted war films. Far better than a DTV movie deserves. One of Van Damme's best.
Rated 28 Oct 2013
30
20th
Feels like a high budget fan fiction. Everything is grimey and there are no laughs in sight. This doesn't work because the plot is just as silly as in the previous US movies. Last fight scene with JCVD is decent.
Rated 31 Mar 2021
85
59th
Viewed March 26, 2021.
Rated 27 Oct 2013
26
10th
Way too serious for the franchise and thus the worst installment.
Rated 22 Nov 2017
60
48th
Hyams Sr and Jnr combined their talents for this surprisingly effective reboot of a disreputable action series. Sr's photography brings a superior visual quality that's rare in low budget genre films, while Jnr demonstrates his knack for staging extended action sequences. Regeneration is not as daring or as ambitious as Day of Reckoning, thematically or aesthetically, and it lacks a compelling lead, but it makes clever use of its dilapidated setting and its aging stars.
Rated 15 Jan 2018
70
41st
Struggled with this at first; the harsh blue lighting and stoic Bulgarian non-professional faces started to wear on my nerves. But it improves immensely as it goes along as Hyams does the opposite of what you'd expect from this kind of movie, gradually slowing the pace and raising the tension, culminating in the great sequence of Van Damme finding and killing Lundgren. If you can excuse the obviously low budget and get through the rough first half this is a pretty fun action movie.
Rated 19 Feb 2024
60
39th
Frankly had a bit of fun with this meat fest.
Rated 17 Feb 2010
93
94th
This film really takes the franchise into a new direction, one of realism. Van Dam's character suffers what seems to be the effects of the memory erasing serum from the first film, along with severe PTSD, and I really liked how it showed that. It showed that he was human and was affected by all the shit they did to him, and by the hell that is war. Dolph Lundgren returns, but doesn't have much screen time. I like the gritty realism, it works well for this movie.
Rated 03 Jan 2010
54
33rd
Far, far, far better than I expected it to be but it's still not very good to be honest. There are impressive moments here and there but overall it can't escape it's short comings. In 2009 there should never be an elite military soldier firing from the hip except in very specific circumstances. It's just immersion breaking to see supposedly elite soldiers that don't know how to hold guns. Still Van Damme's honestly still got it, shame he doesn't get more decent movies thrown his way.
Rated 01 Feb 2011
5
91st
why is a mgs adaption taking so long to get made when John Hyams with a shoestring budget made this awesome military tech noir flick
Rated 03 Aug 2020
61
37th
This movie baffles me. JCVD, despite being the closest thing the movie has to a main character, only appears in two short scenes within the first hour of this 90 minute movie. The UniSol franchise was probably slapped onto the movie to get JCVD and Lundgren to come back. The entire first hour is, apart from a couple good action scenes, pretty boring. But Dolph's pseudo-philosophical, confused blabbering and the last 30 minutes kick major ass.
Rated 12 Apr 2010
45
33rd
I have no idea why I bothered watching this. But it is not a shit as I expected. JCVD has still got the moves!
Rated 20 Feb 2010
27
9th
I liked it better than original movie. Really. But the fact is, I won't remember it in a week. On very account it's solid, serious b-action movie. Kind of a safe bet by filmmakers who REALLY didn't want to fuck up the movie. Downside of such conventional film-making is that it leaves nothing on the viewer. Just another not-so-bad straight-to-video b-movie.
Rated 25 Feb 2010
76
79th
Andrei Arlovski was way better then i thought. Big fan of JCVD and Dolph. Good action movie.
Rated 22 Oct 2011
48
52nd
A remarkably forgettable script, but you can't deny JCVD and Lundgren make for some good action.
Rated 20 Feb 2016
54
17th
An absurdly thin plot is managed with some pretty cool action and an insane body count. It is odd how decent the movie is, a solid B-action flick.

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