Hostages – Action Hero Movies

The basic concept is a good one but the script and cinematography never catch fire, they seem a bit soul-less, a bit like a B movie. The UNISOLs are meant to be cold, not the whole movie.

This movie lacks any significant female role. It had potential for a bit of warmth with the introduction of a non-UNISOL soldier played very well by Mike Pyle, giving Andrei Arlovski‘s latest generation of UNISOL a run for his money. But just as Pyle was growing into his role he got killed off. Interesting plot twist at the very end though, as Pyle’s character appears to have been cloned to create a load of new UNISOLs – this whets the appetite for the fourth & final movie in the saga (Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, 2012) which brings back Van Damme & Arlovski while also co-starring Scott Adkins, but unfortunately does not feature Pyle so the ending to Regeneration is a bit of phony cliffhanger.

Dolph Lundgren does well in his return to the Universal Soldier movie series, as of course does Jean-Claude Van Damme – the main star of every movie in the series except the last (Day Of Reckoning) where Adkins takes over as the main protagonist since Van Damme is getting quite old by this time (in his early 50s) while active soldiers in the real world are generally young (with elastic bodies and impressionable minds). It’s just a shame they’re working with a weak script and deadpan cinematography, so I can’t rate it higher than So-So even if the genre, stars and concept are all excellent.

From the outset it’s apparent that this movie is a better production than most of Van Damme’s movies. Sudden Death is a proper movie and has a very similar concept to Die Hard.

Van Damme plays a fire marshal working at a Pittsburgh Penguins v Chicago Blackhawks hockey game where he also brought his kids, and it turns out the Vice President is having a party in the owner’s box and has a large security detail but it’s been infiltrated by a highly organised gang of crooks who hold the Vice President and all people in the arena to ransom after rigging the whole place to explode, while everyone’s watching the game oblivious. Van Damme’s character smells something’s up when his daughter gets kidnapped after she witnessed a murder, so Van Damme tracks her down and begins to get to the bottom of the whole operation.

I’m generally not a fan of political dramas, but this movie contains just the right amount of that stuff and has just about strong enough actors to make it work well between the faster action scenes.

There aren’t really any boring bits in this movie, so long as you’ve not seen it already within the last few years. But it’s also pretty standard, in a way. So I rate it Upper-OK.