VelocityView Servlet does not handle NULL templates

For some reason the check for NULL was dropped between the velocity tools 1.3 and 2.0. Basically I need a way to send a redirect and skip merging of the template. We used to do that by overriding the handleRequest method, issuing the response.sendRedirect there and returning NULL for the template. However returning NULL would no longer work in 2.0 since the mergeTemplate is done regardless of it.