Jean-Claude Van Damme and Tsui Hark team up for the entertaining mess that is DOUBLE TEAM, on limited edition Blu-ray from 88 Films.

As much as he tries to convince himself that he is retired, federal agent Jack Quinn (Van Damme) is drawn away from his marriage to sculptor Kathryn (Natacha Lindinger, COCO CHANEL & IGOR STRAVINSKY) and their unborn child when he is picked to head an elite team in a sting to bring in his arch nemesis Stavros (Mickey Rourke, NINE ½ WEEKS). When Quinn, however, discovers that Stavros' public rendezvous is with his young son, the agent's hesitation in taking the shot lets Stavros' gang get the drop on them, resulting in multiple deaths of team members, gang members, bystanders, and Stavros' son and the boy's mother. Gravely injured in a final face-off against Stavros, Quinn wakes up in The Colony, a secret island think tank of agents and criminals from all over the world "too valuable to kill and too dangerous to be let free" who put their skills towards solving international terror incidents. No sooner does Quinn learn the rules of the colony from long dead hitman Goldsmythe (Paul Freeman, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) than he starts working on his simultaneous rehabilitation and strategy to bypass the fingerprint checkpoints and underwater lasers to get back home to his wife. Upon returning to France, he barely survives an ambush by Stavros' gang and must rely solely on freelancer Yaz (NBA star Dennis Rodman) and his connections when he tracks Kathryn to Rome where her artistic patron Stavros is planning a special revenge against Quinn's unborn child.

The last in a three-picture deal between Van Damme and Columbia Pictures – although not actually their last collaboration since the studio would pick up subsequent vehicles – DOUBLE TEAM is a hot mess of a film that even looks simultaneously cheap and picturesque. The project originated as "The Colony" focusing entirely on an agent's accommodation to and attempt to escape the island, all of which now takes up about fifteen minutes of running time with as many plot holes at the surrounding story. Although always a decent actor, Van Damme is out of his element in the dramatic storyline, which is where Rourke (in a comeback role) is at his strongest. Rodman's more than decent onscreen performance, on the other hand, is undercut by several dubbed-in one-liners that would have been better either left out or at least uttered by him onscreen rather than seemingly inserted any time that his face is averted. The lensing in France and Rome is picturesque thanks to future Oscar winner Peter Pau (CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON), and the action really picks up in the third act when Quinn attempts to draw Stavros out by sending a message intended to be picked up by every intelligence agency who all convene on a crowded piazza full of a wedding party and tourists for a chaotic shootout, a trip through Rome's catacombs courtesy of Yaz's monk friends – among them English dubbing director Ted Russoff (CANNIBAL FEROX) and THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE's Umberto Raho – and a final showdown in the Colosseum involving tigers and landmines. The action sequences during the first act are technically proficient but strangely unexciting while the latter half is much more exhilarating during the moments of physical combat, with only the Colosseum sequence let down by some bad CGI explosions (DOUBLE TEAM was reportedly the last film that was allowed to be shot there). The scoring of Gary Chang (52 PICK-UP) is rather generic but sounds far more appropriate to the film than the incredibly dumb Rodman-guesting end titles track "Just a Freak". The supporting cast features a number of familiar cult presences including AN AMERICAN HIPPIE IN ISRAEL's Asher Tzarfati, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua (the worm-faced poster boy of Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE), and MOTHER OF TEARS' Valeria Cavalli.

A box office bomb upon release, DOUBLE TEAM hit letterboxed laserdisc and fullscreen VHS from Columbia/Tri-Star in 1997 and barebones, anamorphic widescreen DVD a year later. Mill Creek through their deal with Sony put the film out on Region A Blu-ray in a two-disc, five-film set with only lossy stereo audio while a better region free option was offered up by Germany. Utilizing Sony's existing HD master, 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray is typical of their older masters in that the daylight scenes and close-ups sport depth and good detail while the night scenes can look a little indistinct in the darkest areas of the frame, and the CGI definitely has that nineties habit of looking less dimensional than the live action components of the shot but there are no encoding issues. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track – the German disc offered only lossy DTS – is constantly active with plenty of surround activity and directional effects that greatly enhance the action in the second and third act (as such, it may be subjective that the same qualities do not enhance the action in the first third of the film). Optional English HoH subtitles are provided.