Not one of Jean-Claude's best. Universal Soldier: The Return is a sequel to a movie from 1992 that starred Van Damme and Dolph Lungren. It was pretty good for the shoot-em up, chop-em up genre of movies. Now that 7 years have passed and apparently Hollywood has run out of new ways to portray Van-Damme's extraordinary physical ability, someone got the bright idea of making a sequel.

Universal soldiers were an experiment in re-animating soldiers killed in battle and using technology to physically enhance their bodies while controlling their minds. Naturally, some of them went out of control. What is different in the 1999 version is that the master computer that controls the Unisols (the Army has to make a shortened term and/or acronym for everything) is out of control. Portrayed by Michael Jai White, "Seth" is afraid that he will be terminated and as a result sets off a chain of events where the improved Unisols run rampant, killing their creator. This means that Luc (Van Damme) is the only person alive who knows the code that must be fed into Seth or he will automatically shut down.

That sets off the predictable conflict between the Unisols and Luc, heightened by the fact that aided by a disgruntled former employee of the project, Seth managed to be placed into the body of the best Unisol ever made. Five times stronger than an ordinary human. Along the way, Luc saves the life of a television reporter named Erin and she latches onto him as her "story".

Normally I'm willing to suspend disbelief to a degree but Universal Soldier: The Return asked for just too much of that. After all, most shoot-em-up films forget that all guns that fire bullets have to be reloaded eventually. But writers John Fasano and William Malone really don't understand how chemical weapons work and to suggest that a building full of them could be destroyed with explosives and the risk of spreading a cloud of gas filled with poisonous agents could be averted by spraying airborne neutralizing film takes militaristic fantasy to a new high. Or should that be low? Better yet, a firefight breaks out in the area where such weapons are stored, and none of the many cannisters filled with these toxins get punctured by a stray bullet?

Van Damme is his usual self with all of his performance contained in the punching and kicking. He tries to portray different emotions but it just isn't convincing. The rest of the cast isn't much better although Heidi Schanz as Erin the reporter and obligatory love interest isn't bad. She just doesn't have anyone around her to play off of. If you're a fan of bodybuilding on ESPN you may enjoy seeing fitness guru Kiana Tom in this movie.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, you never know what you're gonna get when you plunk down your cash for a Van Damme movie. Some of them are among the best of the genre. Others are among the worst. Universal Soldier: The Return is on the lower end of the scale.