Here’s where it starts getting good again. Ten years after "The Return," Jean-Claude Van Damme, um, returns to the franchise under the watchful eye of John Hyams, son of journeyman cinematographer and director Peter Hyams (who shoots "Universal Soldier: Regeneration," incredibly). In this one, Van Damme’s Luc Deveraux is undergoing a kind of intense spa treatment to turn him back into Some Dude (again: the events of the sequel are pretty blatantly ignored) after a former Universal Soldier is revealed to be a bloodthirsty terrorist. (One of the many awesome things about this movie is how unrelentingly violent it is.)
Also back for more fun (for the first time since the original) is Dolph Lundgren, who is totally amazing and has a genuinely incredible death scene. The younger Hyams knows his way around an action sequence, artfully staging and choreographing set pieces that would trip up most younger directors, and setting the stage for the next film, which is honestly flat-out brilliant (more on that in a minute). While the timeline of the sequels has, with the sequel and this film, become more linear, the fact that they don’t acknowledge what happened in "The Return" as canon and oftentimes push thing to bizarre, sometimes surreal places, ensures the franchise is just as weird as ever.
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