The Movie:

A few years have passed since the events in the first Universal Soldier film came to an end. The story catches up with Luc Devereux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who now works as government agency technical expert. Along with his lady partner Maggie (Kiana Tom), the pair have undergone rigorous combat training together to make sure that they're still at the top of their game, as they're the pair who are going to be responsible for tweaking the government's top secret UniSol program. The purpose of revamping the program? They want to make a more advanced breed of soldier - stronger, better, smarter, faster.

The results of the program are evident immediately. The new breed of UniSol subjects are not only more physically advanced than those that came prior, but they're also connected to one another though a massive artificial intelligence network known as SETH (which stands for Self-Evolving Thought Helix). Unfortunately, the government has run out of funding for the project and needs to shut it down. When SETH learns of this development, it goes rogue and sends out all of the new Universal Soldiers to stop the shut down and kill anyone who gets in its way. The leader of the UniSols is Romeo (Bill Goldberg), a massive hulking man machine, who is seemingly impossible to stop. Only one man can stop SETH and his army before it's too late, and that's Luc, who is the only one who knows the code that can deactivate SETH and shut down the program. SETH has a few more tricks up his sleeve, however, when he teams up with a human computer hacker who goes by the name of Squid (Brent Hinkley). Squid allows SETH to take on a humanoid form (played by Michael Jai White) and head after Luc himself. Meanwhile, Luc has to deal with a nosey reporter named Erin Young (Heidi Schanz) who wants to 'get the scoop' and the overly ambitious General Radford (Daniel von Bargen) who wants to completely eliminate all of the UniSol's as soon as possible.

What Luc doesn't count on, however, is how cunning SETH really is. When SETH kidnaps Luc's teenage daughter Hillary (Karis Paige Bryant), he leaves Luc no choice but to take him down once and for all.

Directed by Mic Rogers and co-written by William Malone and John Fasano (the director of the immortally awesome Rock N Roll Nightmare), Universal Soldier: The Return takes the cool concept of the original 1992 Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich film and milks it for all it's worth. The film is entertaining enough if you can get past all of the bad science and horrible computer logic required to suspend your disbelief, but it lacks the potency of the Van Damme-Lundgren team that made the first in the series so much ultra-violent fun. That said, Michael Jai White makes for a decent enough foe for Van Damme's Devereux, and Goldberg is pretty impressive in his role as the ultra-macho killing machine that is Romeo. Hinkley tends to overdo it a bit as Squid and the hacking scenes are completely ridiculous by today's standards, but the movie is what it is, a incredibly ridiculous follow up to an already ridiculous, albeit very fun, premise.

The hand to hand combat scenes are handled well here, showing off some impressive fight choreography. The shoot outs lack the tension and excitement that they should have had to really successfully pull us in to the picture, and at times you'll feel like there's too much exposition and not action. A lot of the film is characters running around various labs avoiding conflict rather than reveling in it or embracing it. If the movie is going to go for a dumbed down script, as this one does, it should at least deliver some quality thrills, chills and spills at a good pace to make up for it and hold our attention and Universal Soldier: The Return doesn't quite get there. It has moments that impressive and the finale is fun but these moments don't add up to enough of a whole to really make for an essential watch and the picture is a mediocre effort because of it. It's well shot and hammy enough to make for an okay time killer, but little more than that and odds are pretty good that if you haven't seen the first film, you'll be left scratching your head a few times. There's little here to make this picture stand out and as such, you're not going to find yourself pining away for it time and again.

The Video:

Universal Soldier: The Return debuts on Blu-ray in a 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen 1080p AVC encoded presentation. Detail levels look pretty strong, especially during facial close ups, but the colors aren't quite as eye popping as you might think. You'll notice during the forest scene early on that the greens look a little bit less lush than they could be, though this could be a stylistic choice on the part of the filmmakers as it doesn't really appear to be an encoding issue. There aren't any noticeable problems with edge enhancement to complain about nor are there any problems with mpeg compression to note. There isn't much in the way of print damage to not, just a natural amount of film grain, though skin tones sometimes look just a little too pink. Overall, however, the image is pretty good and it provides a welcome and quite noticeable improvement in detail and definition over its standard definition counterpart.

The Audio:

Dolby TrueHD 48kHz 5.1 tracks are provided in English, French and Portuguese with a Spanish language track supplied in standard Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. Optional subtitles are provided in English. English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic and Dutch.

The English TrueHD track is pretty strong. The action scenes in particular demonstrate some nice channel separation and the levels are nicely balanced here. Bass response is pretty strong and the score is spread out nicely across the entire playing field. Dialogue stays clean and clear throughout the movie and there are no problems with hiss or distortion to report. That said, the track doesn't have quite as much punch as more recent action movies have had on Blu-ray. It's a fine mix for a movie that was made a decade ago and there aren't any problems with it, but you can't help feeling like certain scene should have had just a bit more punch to them. The explosive finale sounds great, however, and there's plenty of nice low end rumble during this scene as well as some fun surround activity to keep you on your toes.

The Extras:

There aren't a ton of supplements on this disc, but there are a few (all of which are in standard definition and have been ported over from the standard definition DVD release), starting with Jean-Claude Van Damme: Looking Back - Moving Forward (12:09) which features some interview clips with Van Damme but which is mostly just an assembly of clips from other Sony owned Van Damme pictures mixed in with some talking head bits from the man himself. It's really little more than a long commercial.

Also included is Michael J. White: A Universal Soldier's Workout (4:04) which is really just a quick look at White's exercise regiment and his diet that helped whip him into shape for this film. We get a look at him sparring, stretching and exercising and he talks about what he had to do to stay in peak physical condition for this fairly physical role.

Last but not least is The Making Of Universal Soldier: The Return (4:44) which is nothing but a PR piece made to promote the film upon its original release. There are some sound bits in here with Van Damme and a few of the other cast members as well as some behind the scenes clips that are rather interesting to see, but there's no real substance here at all.

Trailers are included for The Fall, The Da Vinci Code: Extended Cut and Dragon Wars. Animated menus and scene selection are included and this disc is Blu-ray live enabled.

Overall:

A weak and goofy sequel in pretty much every way possible, Universal Soldier: The Return has a few fun action set pieces but is otherwise a forgettable film. Van Damme enthusiasts will enjoy it more than others but the man has made many other much better films than this one. Sony's Blu-ray release looks and sounds decent enough, though the extras are no great shakes, making this one you'll want to rent first if you don't already know you're a fan of the film.

Ian lives in NYC with his wife where he writes for DVD Talk, runs Rock! Shock! Pop!. He likes NYC a lot, even if it is expensive and loud.