Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Ron Silver, Mia Sara, Bruce
McGill, Gloria Reuben, Scott Bellis, Scott Lawrence, Kenneth Walsh
Director: Peter Hyams
Action Director: Glen Randall Jr.
Jean-Claude Van Damme’s star was still on the rise by the time 1994 rolled around. The previous year had been uneven, with him showing up in an action classic (Hard Target) and a lesser action thriller (Nowhere to Run). But even in the case of the latter, under the pen of hot-sh*t Hollywood writer Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct and Showgirls), Van Damme cemented his status as one of the sexiest action stars of his day. Meanwhile, Steven Seagal was bescumbering the good will generated by the success of Under Siege with the self-righteous, eco-friendly On Deadly Ground. So it was definitely Van Damme’s time to shine: his two highest-grossing films[1] came out that year: Street Fighter and this one.
Timecop begins in a memorable fashion: a group of Confederate soldiers escorting a shipment of gold across a muddy trail on a rainy day are stopped by a stranger. The stranger requests that they give him the gold. When they refuse and draw their muskets, the guy whips out a pair of Tech-9 sub-machine guns with infrared sights and mows the soldiers down. Bad. Ass.
We switch to the present (i.e. 1994), in which a Washington bureaucrat approaches the Senate Oversight Committee and informs them that, yes, time travel has been invented. He adds that a Time Enforcement Commission needs to be formed to police the use of time travel. While the senators initially laugh off the prospect, the bureaucrat reminds them of the possibilities of Saddam Hussein going back and stealing atomic bomb technology circa 1945 and stuff like that. They relent, and the task of organizing and overseeing the agency falls in the lap of Senator Aaron McComb (Blue Steel’s Ron Silver).
Shortly afterward, D.C. police officer Max Walker (Van Damme) receives an offer to join the nascent TEC as an agent. While he’s still chewing on it, unknown thugs invade his house, shoot him, and blow the place up, killing his wife, Melissa (Mia Sara, best known for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). And if I didn’t know any better, Senator McComb was hanging out near the attic window just seconds before the explosion. Hmm…
Ten years later, Walker has indeed accepted his job and his latest mission is to bust a former partner, Lyle Atwood. Atwood has been traveling back to the Great Depression and buying up stock in companies that will ultimately survive the Crash and become profitable in 2004. When Walker shows up in 1929 to bring his partner in, Atwood reveals that he and much of the TEC have been bought out by Senator McComb. The senator is now running for president, and TV time and campaign costs are skyrocketing. Time travel is a novel way to finance his bid. Unfortunately for Walker, Lyle refuses to snitch on his boss and is summarily executed for the crime of trying to alter time.
It doesn’t take McComb long to find out that Walker is onto him and soon the former’s goons are showing up unannounced at Walker’s apartment. They’re no match for the greatness of Van Damme’s splits, though. And since it was a former partner who got busted, the TEC partners Walker up with an agent from Internal Affairs, Sarah Fielding (Gloria Reuben, of “ER” and “Cloak and Dagger”). Walker and Fielding’s first mission together is to investigate an unauthorized visit to the future at a computer factory…in Washington D.C…in 1994.
Time-travel movies often deal with paradoxes that make your head spin if you try to think about it for more than two minutes. For example, the early scene with the Senate Oversight Committee establishes that in time travel, one cannot move forward because the future hasn’t happened yet. But in the next scenes, we see McComb in Walker’s house as it explodes, so we know he’s Future McComb. Doesn’t that mean that the future has already happened? In that case, we can assume that in Future #1 (which we don’t see), Melissa was alive and Walker was already on McComb’s trail, and thus they decided to try to kill him before he joined TEC. But they failed, which apparently transformed Future #1 into Future #2, in which Melissa is dead and TEC agent Walker is not only pursuing McComb, but ends up at the scene of the crime in 1994. That would mean that the movie ends in Future #3, in which Melissa is alive and Senator McComb simply disappeared under mysterious circumstances. But do all three of those realities exist in parallel? The mind boggles!
Being a 1990s film, especially an early 90s movie, one will note the existence of mediocre CGI, which more or less defined the decade (along with Grunge and Rob Liefeld comic book art). The time-space warp distortions are fine, although the final effect that marks the climax is quite silly by today’s standards. It also hinges on a number of (incorrect) assumptions about matter and the human body.
Stunt coordinator duties belong to Glenn Randall Jr., another Hollywood veteran. Randall had started off as a stuntman in the late 50s, working on the epic Ben Hur, and graduated twenty years later. His credits include Raiders of the Lost Ark; Firewalker; Maximum Overdrive; and Species. I assume that Van Damme assisted, if not commandeered, in the actual fight choreography. Timecop boasts four major set pieces: a fight and shoot-out in a Depression-era office building; a fight at Agent Walker’s apartment; a huge gunfight at a computer factory; and a final showdown at Officer Walker’s house.
The former is notable for giving viewers a chance to watch Van Damme bust out some escrima skills against one of his opponents. The second fight sequence features a cameo by Taiwanese martial artist and Hollywood veteran James Lew, who has a knife fight with Van Damme. Van Damme is rather stiff in this scene, while Lew is just all over the place and steals the show. The computer factory sequence has a nice mixture of simple martial arts, gunplay, and explosions. It also has a memorable death involving liquid nitrogen. The climax is notable for focusing more on suspense and build-up rather than mindless fighting. One of the killers in this scene is played by Richard Faraci, who played one of the jewelry thieves in Rumble in the Bronx.
Timecop is an entertaining little sci-fi actioner with some solid action sequences, an interesting plot (albeit one that might not bear too much scrutiny), and even a healthy dose of T&A for “guys who like movies,” as TBS once said. Plus it has Van Damme in briefs doing the splits for you ladies out there. It’s got a little of everything for everybody! No wonder it was so successful![1] - I should point out that Van
Damme voiced a supporting character in Kung
Fu Panda 2 and played the villain in The
Expendables 2, which made more money than these two. But he didn’t play the
lead role in those.
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