![]() As one wonk explains at the beginning: "You can't go into the future because it hasn't happened yet. Max Walker (everyone should have their name appropriated for a Hollywood blockbuster hero), is drafted into a top-secret US government agency with the job of going back in time to catch baddies who are trying to change history to their own advantage. We open in 1994 (the year of the film's release). I think there's something oddly poignant about his performance, especially when we know where his career went afterwards. Everybody involved, from the director down, is clearly phoning it in. The time machine is basically a rocket-powered Go-kart. There's also a rather sad, lowish-budget feel about the whole thing. Pumped-up European star with funny accent who can't really act? Check time travel? Yup? Lots and lots of gratuitous violence? You got it. Which he does, a lot.) And, yes, this was clearly focus-grouped from the start by people looking for the next Schwarzenegger. ("Van Damme is compelling only when he takes his clothes off," was another's verdict. When all's said and done Timecop is basically "a low-rent Terminator", as one critic put it. ( Nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay at this site’s Best of 1994 Awards).Our hero in Timecop is poor old Jean-Claude van Damme at the high-water mark of his career, when some studio execs thought he might be going somewhere. A film sequel was later made as the video-released Timecop: The Berlin Decision (2003) starring Jason Scott Lee. ![]() The series was okay but was cancelled in mid-season due to schizophrenic scheduling. The film was spun out into a short-lived tv series Timecop (1997-8), starring T.W. He also produced the appealing Famous Monsters team-up The Monster Squad (1987). Timecop was directed by Peter Hyams who has a strong association with genre with the likes of Capricorn One (1978) about a faked Mars mission Outland (1981), an action film set on Jupiter’s moon Io the 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) sequel 2010 (1984) Stay Tuned (1992) about people trapped in a Hell of tv shows the monster movie The Relic (1997) the Biblical End Times action film End of Days (1999) and the Ray Bradbury adaptation A Sound of Thunder (2005) about dinosaurs and time travel. Ron Silver, as always, plays well, doing a good variation on his frequently wheeled out yuppie villain characterisation. (In the quibbles department, one kept wondering what happened to the high-speed vehicles and all the excess velocity that suddenly vanished when people went through the time barrier). Screenwriter Mark Verheiden, a comic-book writer who also wrote same holiday season’s The Mask (1994) and later a producer/writer on tv’s excellent revival of Battlestar Galactica (2003-9) and a number of other shows including Smallville (2001-11), Heroes (2006-10), Constantine (2015) and Daredevil (2015-8), makes the script work exceedingly well and exceedingly consistently. Jean-Claude Van Damme as timecop Max Walker The most effective of these are those that centre around the time editing, like when Jean-Claude Van Damme returns from the past to find the TEC operation all but disbanded, his best friend not knowing him, McComb ahead in the Senatorial race and there no record of his fellow agent and, most intriguingly, the ending where Van Damme returns home to his wife and a son, to a life of ten years that he has never lived. The plot has an ingenious number of twists. In fact, the script did not need to be sold as an action vehicle – although one supposes that that is the way films have to be promoted these days. ![]() ![]() The film has its requisite level of martial arts punch-ups but the action element never gets in the way of the sharp and intelligent script. And, although Jean-Claude Van Damme and the word acting should never be used in the same sentence, Timecop perhaps comes the closest he has come to doing so yet. In some places, Timecop was being billed as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first stab at serious acting. To some surprise, Timecop is more than that – in fact, one might say it is for Jean-Claude Van Damme what The Terminator (1984) was for Arnold Schwarzenegger, allowing the action star to immerse his persona inside a tightly plotted vehicle. Perhaps it was the Jean-Cluade Van Damme name above the title on the poster but one went into Timecop with little in the way of expectations, assuming that it would merely be a mindless action vehicle that involved Van Damme throwing his feet about in previous historical eras. ![]()
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