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YMMV / Universal Soldier: The Return

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  • Awesome Music: The soundtrack, which features "Chaos" by Tim Skold, "Bled for Days" by Static-X, and "Crush 'Em" by Megadeth.
  • Cliché Storm: S.E.T.H.'s speech, which is both bombastic and awesome and hilarious for sounding like every other speech given by an A.I. Is a Crapshoot villain ever. At the end he even basically declares himself God.
  • Magnificent Bastard: S.E.T.H. (Self-Evolving Thought Helix) is an artificial intelligence built to oversee the new generation of Unisols, Super Soldiers made from the bodies of dead U.S. soldiers. While initially benign, as soon as S.E.T.H. determines that he is to be disassembled following the project's shutdown, he has the Unisols' cranial implants surgically altered so they will obey only him and turn on their human controllers, before rewriting his program to make himself independent. S.E.T.H. manipulates a former technician involved with his construction, Squid, into building a Super-Unisol body for him so he can escape into the real world before killing him. In order to deactivate a kill switch command in his program, which he later manages to decipher on his own, S.E.T.H. has his soldier Romeo pursue Luc Deveraux and personally kidnaps his daughter Hillary, deciding to turn her into a Uni Sol as he thinks it will be for her own good. S.E.T.H. boasted of his plans to replace all humanity with Unisols, stating that where once he was a machine who yearned to be a man, he became far more than either.
  • Moral Event Horizon: During the Uni Sols' takeover of the building, S.E.T.H. did this by murdering Dr. Cotner, Peterson, and a cameraman when they tried to shut him down. He also had his Uni Sol army to murder a massive army of soldiers and a news film crew. During the kidnapping of Hilary, he got himself and Romeo to murder Squid, several security guards and hospital orderlies. He also got Romeo to murder Maggie before reviving her as a Uni Sol to serve him, and that he intends to subject Hilary to the same fate while trying to killing Luc.
  • Special Effect Failure: There are some painfully obvious CGI effects, for a $40 million budgeted movie. Especially jarring when you consider that the rest of the series have much more impressive effects despite being no more expensive than $20 million, or heck, $11 million.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: Michael Jai White as the primary villain S.E.T.H. gives a genuinely earnest performance without going overboard (along with Van Damme, but he has Dull Surprise in literally everything he's ever done). By contrast, professional wrestler Bill Goldberg, who plays the secondary villain, is Chewing the Scenery the entire time.note 

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