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Released by: Mill Creek Entertainment
Released on: October 9, 2012.
Director: Various
Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Vivica A. Fox
Year: 1999/1998/2006/2005
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The Movies:
Mill Creek bundles together four straight to video action movies starring everyone's favorite Belgian action star, previously released as single disc releases by Sony at a pretty great price. Here's what you get…
Universal Soldier: The Return:
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.
Knock Off:
Because everyone wanted to see JCVD team up with Rob Schneider, right? Directed by Tsui Hark, who was in the habit of making great action films for a while there, 1998's Knock Off is set in Hong Kong just before the island was handed back to the Chinese. Here a man named Marcus Ray (Van Damme), known as the 'King Of The Knock Offs' sends a shipment of counterfeit designer jeans to the United States only to inadvertently wind up embroiled in a ransom plot by the Russian mafia involving a bunch of teeny tiny 'micro-bombs' stuck inside some 'States bound goods. What goods? Ray's counterfeit jeans, of course.
Ray's more than just a bootleg clothing dude, however - he's got some pretty serious skills in other areas as well, and it's this skill set that convinces the C.I.A., lead by Harry Johanson (Paul Sorvino), that he's the right man to make this problem go away. He sets out to try and find the counterfeit goods before they can hit American soil but along the way he teams up with an American agent named Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider) who is not what he seems.
Tsui Hark's command of atypical pacing and action set pieces keeps this one watchable despite the irritating presence of Rob Schneider, who comes close but can't quite manage to completely ruin the film. Paul Sorvino delivers a decent enough supporting role and Van Damme is more or less just doing what we'd seen him do plenty of other times at this point in his career. He hadn't evolved into the more interesting roles he'd take in the mid-2000's and is instead still that cocky, over confident and less likeable JVCD. He does what he does well, however, exuding a decent presence in the action scenes and showing some decent comedic timing in a few spots.
The story is as preposterous as it is predictable but the movie features some pretty impressive stunt work, some great camera angles and cinematography and is actually quite well put together on a technical level. The very embodiment of a dumb mainstream action movie but you could certainly find worse ways to kill ninety minutes in front of the TV.
The Hard Corps:
Writer/director Sheldon Lettich has worked with Jean-ClaudeVan Damme a few times on some of his more popular films like Legionnaire and Lionheart so, despite the fact that he wrote the abysmal Double Impact, fans of the Muscles From Brussels had some anticipation for The Hard Corps which would team them up again, this time throwing the lovely Vivica A. Fox into the mix.
The story revolves around a veteran named Phillip Sauvage (Van Damme) who has recently returned from tours of duty in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Unsure what to do with himself once he returns where he finds himself living in a run down old veteran's home, he and his pal, Clarence Bowden (Julian Christopher) take a job guarding a former heavyweight boxer one night at a dance club. Things are going fine until when the boxer, Wayne Barclay (Razaaq Adoti), and his sister Tamara (Vivica A. Fox) go to exit the club. An SUV pulls up and a few gangsters open fire on them, causing Phillip to have to dive into action. He saves Wayne and Tamara but Clarence is killed in the process, which eats him up inside as Clarence once saved his life in combat.
Tamara and Wayne are so impressed by Phillip's bravery that they decide to hire him on fulltime to head up their personal security force. Unfortunately, the cops are looking for Phillip, it seems that Uzi he used was illegal and he wasn't licensed to be carrying that weapon. Detective Teague (Ron Bottitta) takes him in and warns Barclay that Phillip is mentally disturbed, scarred from the time he spent in combat. Barclay gives him the benefit of the doubt and puts up his bail money and brings him back on board where he uses Phillip's skills to protect himself from a rap music producer with ties to the underworld who Barclay helped put behind bars. It seems that he's free from prison now and that he wants revenge.
The Hard Corps is pretty much a by the numbers affair. While Jean-Claude does a pretty decent job of playing the tortured veteran of a war that he know questions, the script doesn't give him much to work with. Much of the running time is spent following the bad guys, and while we obviously need to understand how diabolical this evil rap guy is, there's a little too much screen time afforded him. Do we need to see him partying it up with big-booty dancing girls? Once, maybe. But that'd be it. The film is obviously trying to market itself to the hip hop community which is all well and good but it doesn't do a good job of it and rather than come off as a good action movie or a good hip hop or street gangster movie it instead comes off as a half assed hybrid of the two genres.
Vivica A. Fox is fun to look at during the almost two hour running time of the film and she does a decent enough job as the smart and sexy sister of the big time boxer. You can believe that she cares around her brother and therefore you can understand her concern, though the way that she goes about setting up the security team is a little unrealistic. Of course, you know from the start that she and Jean-Claude are going to fall for one another and the script delivers as hokey and corny an ending as you'd expect it to - without spoiling it, let it suffice to say that you will know very early on where it's going.
These types of complaints are part and parcel with the low budget action genre and if the movie delivers the goods in terms of the shoot outs and the fights and the car chases it's easy enough to overlook them. Does The Hard Corps at least do that? To an extent, yes. The first shoot out scene is done quite well and it is a pretty suspenseful set piece. There's also a great scene where Phillip and Wayne get in the ring together that not only provides some heavy hitting and powerful punches but also effectively builds their characters. These moments do shine through and it is for these moments and the reasonably exciting, if utterly predictable, finale that makes this movie worth a look. It isn't on par with better recent Van Damme fare such as In Hell or Wake Of Death but his fans should enjoy it none the less even if it won't likely win him any new ones.
Second In Command:
The small Eastern European country of 'Moldavia' has recently seen some political unrest - a new prime minister has been elected by a landslide victory but there is still a faction out there that wants to take him down and gain control of the country for themselves. In order to do this, they place a sniper in such a position that when he opens fire on a crowd outside the palace, it looks like the prime minister's guards did the shooting. Of course, this makes things look really bad and a riot breaks out. Good thing for the prime minister then that an American Marine named Sam Keenan has just shown up at the American Embassy. He and a few of the Marines now under his control break the prime minister out of his office and bring him to the embassy where they hole up and try to figure out just what on Earth is going on.
Once Keenan has the prime minister safely stashed away, he and his soldiers do a bit of investigating and find out that there's actually a militia group behind the planning of the riots and the murder of an innocent civilian. They've also taken a few hostage, including Keenan's girlfriend - an English reporter, to ensure that they Americans are willing to negotiate. Adding to that is the fact that this militia group has ties to the military and have called in a few favors and as such, are in process of having the embassy surrounded. Keenan and company have called in for reinforcements but Washington says it'll be a good six hours before they arrive, meaning that he and his dozen or so Marines are going to have to work together to fend off the advancing enemy and protect the prime minister from those who would see him dead.
Sound kind of familiar in the plot department? It should, because Second In Command is very much like The Alamo except with Van Damme in the lead instead of John Wayne, and an Eastern European setting instead of a Texan one… and with more tanks and helicopters. You know what, though? Originality aside, it works and it works well. Second In Command starts off pretty quickly and it builds very nicely right up until the ending. It's predictable and we more or less know how it's going to finish but it is still a lot of fun getting there thanks to some very solid direction, strong action set pieces, and some genuinely cool screen presence courtesy of the Muscles from Brussels himself.
Say what you will about Jean Claude, the man has made many a bad film, but age has been unusually kind to him in that now that he's a little older, he's got this sort of weathered look to him that works well in the roles he has recently been choosing. Check out Ringo Lam's In Hell or the more recent Wake Of Death for performances similar to the one he delivers here, that of the more world weary and down to earth hero rather than the untouchable kickboxer type he's handled in the past. These parts are definitely a step in the right direction for him, proving that, while he'll probably never be Orson Welles or Humphrey Bogart, the guy isn't a half bad actor when he gets parts that play to his strengths, such as the part he has in Second In Command.
But how does the action stand up? Let's face it, that's the real reason anyone is going to be checking this one out, right? Well, thankfully the action scenes are strong. There's surprisingly little martial arts action here and most of the excitement comes from the gun play or from the well built scenes of tension that occur before said gun play, but there are a couple of moments where JC snaps a few bones. Lots of shoot outs, sniper scenes, and explosions courtesy of air attack vehicles and hand held rocket launchers bring a whole lot of boom to the movie and there's certainly no shortage of onscreen violence and carnage. Thankfully, underneath all of that is a surprisingly good action thriller.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Universal Soldier: The Return, The Hard Corps and Second In Command are all presented in 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen, while Knock Off is presented in 2.35.1 non-anamorphic widescreen (Blah! The packaging says it's anamorphic but the screen caps don't lie).
Quality wise, there are some mild compression artifacts present during a couple of the darker scenes, as well as some mild edge enhancement but none of it is overly severe. Colors look pretty bold and robust for each of the films without coming across as overcooked (except in a few scenes where it's obviously an intentional stylistic choice, most noticeably in The Russian Specialist but also in the opening of Attack Force), and the flesh tones in the film remain lifelike without turning too pink or too orange. It isn't a perfect transfer with the aforementioned authoring issues (the aliasing is heavy in spots), but there isn't any print damage worth complaining and the grain that is noticeable is only of the very fine variety.
Each of the four movies gets an English language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track that does a great job of handling the action scenes. These are pretty aggressive mixes that differentiate and place the action sound effects across the soundstage as required by the way the films play out. Plenty of gunshots, bone cracking, and heavy hand to hand combat as well as the background music swells up behind (though, thankfully, not overtop of) the dialogue, which lets the talkier bits stay clean and easy to follow. There are no alternate language options, subtitles or closed captioning options provided for any of the movies.
Aside from chapter selection, there are no extra features on this release.
The Final Word:
Again, there's no reason to double dip here if you have the previous releases but if you don't, this is a great way to get four decent (if not classic) Jean-Claude Van Damme movies into your collection in decent shape at a great price. For that reason, it's recommended for fans of the man or those who enjoy goofball action movies in general.