Jean-Claude Van Damme has made some real stinkers in is time. He's fought himself on several occasions and made us all laugh or scream with his attempts to act. His movies are crap, but I find a lot of them fun to watch. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN does not have to requistite b-movie fun that saved the other Van Damme pictures from utter unwatchability.
This sequel is essentially a low budget action movie trying to imitate a high budget action movie and failing. Often times a low budget will inspire a creative approach to the material by the filmmakers, but the director of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN is a former stuntman who can't quite grasp the concepts of creativity or originality. The entire film is a hideous mound of cliches. Some of the fight scenes are good, but they can't redeem the failings in script, direction, photography, casting, score, performances, etc.
Van Damme plays the same character he did in the first film, now helping the military to train the newest line of cyborg/zombie soldiers. His daughter makes friends with S.E.T.H., the HAL like supercomputer that controls the universal soldiers. A general shows up talking about cutting military spending and how the universal soldier program must be shut down. Van Damme makes a lame remark about how its better to turn dead soldiers into cyborgs than to send live people into battle (Ha!). The computer gets mad, takes over the base, and tries to survive with the help of a mis-stereotyped computer hacker. Van Damme is trapped in the base with your typical lovely reporter whom he must save while trying to stop the computer and the soldiers it controls. From there everything is completely predictable, accept more annoying then you thought it would be.
The movie is a waste of film and time and the meager budget wasted on it could have been better used on a dozen better independent films. The money did this movie no good. The "high-tech" military base is composed mostly of break-away glass and aluminum siding. The cyborg soldiers in this one are just people with laser-pointers stuck on their glasses. One unisol, who looks like a pro-wrestler, is killed again and again by our hero and all he can say is "I hate that guy". The action is all confined and the film is under-populated.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN is a useless and boring waste of resources that even Van Damme is better than. Instead of this, watch CYBORG or LION HEART. They suck, but compared to this, they're classics.
This sequel is essentially a low budget action movie trying to imitate a high budget action movie and failing. Often times a low budget will inspire a creative approach to the material by the filmmakers, but the director of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN is a former stuntman who can't quite grasp the concepts of creativity or originality. The entire film is a hideous mound of cliches. Some of the fight scenes are good, but they can't redeem the failings in script, direction, photography, casting, score, performances, etc.
Van Damme plays the same character he did in the first film, now helping the military to train the newest line of cyborg/zombie soldiers. His daughter makes friends with S.E.T.H., the HAL like supercomputer that controls the universal soldiers. A general shows up talking about cutting military spending and how the universal soldier program must be shut down. Van Damme makes a lame remark about how its better to turn dead soldiers into cyborgs than to send live people into battle (Ha!). The computer gets mad, takes over the base, and tries to survive with the help of a mis-stereotyped computer hacker. Van Damme is trapped in the base with your typical lovely reporter whom he must save while trying to stop the computer and the soldiers it controls. From there everything is completely predictable, accept more annoying then you thought it would be.
The movie is a waste of film and time and the meager budget wasted on it could have been better used on a dozen better independent films. The money did this movie no good. The "high-tech" military base is composed mostly of break-away glass and aluminum siding. The cyborg soldiers in this one are just people with laser-pointers stuck on their glasses. One unisol, who looks like a pro-wrestler, is killed again and again by our hero and all he can say is "I hate that guy". The action is all confined and the film is under-populated.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN is a useless and boring waste of resources that even Van Damme is better than. Instead of this, watch CYBORG or LION HEART. They suck, but compared to this, they're classics.