Max Walker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is a member of the Time Enforcement Commission, a government agency designed to monitor and regulate the use of time travel. When Max’s former partner travels back in time to make a few choice stock purchases, Walker uncovers a conspiracy to rig the 2004 presidential election.

At the center of this conspiracy is a ruthless senator named Aaron McComb (Ron Silver), who will stop at nothing to put himself in the Oval Office, even if it means irrevocably changing the course of history. Walker pursues McComb back to 1994, where he unexpectedly runs into Melissa (Mia Sara), his late wife. With Melissa’s impending death only days away, Walker races to find a way to stop McComb, preserve history, and save the lives of his wife and unborn child.   

CRITIQUE

The plot of Timecop is its own worst enemy. Writers Mike Richardson and Mark Verheiden (who created the Dark Horse comic on which the movie is based) spend an awful lot of time defining the rules of time travel, then shoot themselves in the foot by spending the final half of the movie having their lead character completely ignore them. Worse yet, they expect us not to notice or care they’ve done this. I know this is a Van Damme vehicle, and the last thing you should do while watching a Van Damme vehicle is think, but the last thing anyone writing a Van Damme vehicle should do is invite you to think.

Think about this: If time travel is possible, and if even the smallest altering of events could have catastrophic repercussions in the future, isn’t there inherent risk in attempting to stop someone else from screwing with the past? The movie has Van Damme popping in and out of the past willy-nilly, never pausing to consider the ramifications of the his actions. Hell, Walker does more damage in the past than anyone he pursues, but nobody seems to notice or give a damn.

Then again, the final outcome of the movie pretty much negates the need for the events of the first eighty minutes, and the coda only serves to raise more questions, leading me to believe no one involved gave the slightest bit of thought to logic or coherence. This is the sort of flick whose more head-scratching aspects are defended by fans with the old It’s Just a Movie argument, which is really all you need to know.   

Director Peter Hyams (who dabbled in similar subject matter in the even worse A Sound of Thunder, and whose career took a serious turn for the worse with this movie) brings his no-real-style-of-his-own professionalism to the proceedings, but his efforts are hampered by a somewhat meager budget and a lead who, and I can’t stress this enough, simply cannot act.

Van Damme makes Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal look like master thespians, emoting with all of the force of one those giant Easter Island statues. I’ll never understand exactly how he became an action star, even to the very modest degree of success his career achieved. Beyond the ability to jump and kick people (which was always enhanced by clever editing), Van Damme didn’t really have much in his arsenal.

His opponents always appeared to be getting their asses kicked by the world’s toughest ballerina, and that got old real fast. And despite design contributions from Syd Mead, the world of the future (or at least what was the future at the time of the movie’s original release) is cheap and uninspired. The cars all look more like shipping containers on wheels, and the weapons are nothing more than run-of-the-mill pistols with fatter barrels.  

I hate to keep belaboring the same point, but here are a few other things I don’t get. How does that gold theft at the beginning make sense? At that point in time only the research team and the U.S. government have access to the time machine, so how did a foreign terrorist manage to go back in time?

Backwards time travel requires the use of a rocket pod, yet getting back to the future only requires some little box with a blinking red light. Where does that rocket pod go after it drops off its passengers? And why does it always drop its passengers off in inopportune locations?

Speaking of puzzling technology, how is Van Damme’s little PDA able to locate his partner after she’s been trapped in the past? Given that it’s future technology, exactly why does it interface with in order to retrieve data? Is it somehow able to squirt a data signal into the future? But here’s the biggie: At the end, right as Van Damme makes his last-ditch effort to fix everything, why doesn’t Silver’s character just step to the right?

Time Cop proved to be Van Damme’s biggest box office success, and it received most of the only halfway-decent notices of his career. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this the best Van Damme flick, as that would indicate there’s actually such thing as a good Van Damme flick, which certainly isn’t the case. I wouldn’t even call it the most entertaining.

That dubious distinction still belongs to either Universal Soldier, which benefits from Roland Emmerich’s slick treatment and manages to entertain in spite of itself, or Double Impact, in which Van Damme is afforded the opportunity to play twins, meaning he’s allowed to interact with himself, the results of which are entertaining for reasons that should be obvious.

THE VIDEO

The 2.35:1/1080p transfer (unwisely slapped onto a single-layer disc) is decidedly average. Hyams once again acted as his own cinematographer, and the image exhibits all of his trademarks. A degree of softness is inherent in the photography, (Hyams can’t seem to move past the stylistics of the ‘70s), most surfaces look wet and slick, and colors are nicely saturated.

Close-ups can look very good, and some of the brighter exteriors look fantastic. But on the whole it’s a little too soft and hazy, especially the darker scenes, which are lacking in sharpness and detail. Excessive noise is also a nuisance at times, especially during heavily-composited visual effects shots (the famous shot of Van Damme dropping out of the time vortex directly in front of a speeding semi is a veritable swarm of noise).

THE AUDIO

The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is a huge disappointment. This is undoubtedly one of the most anemic modern action soundtracks I’ve ever heard. The end credits indicate the movie was outfitted with a DTS track for its theatrical release, so it seems to me the sound designers would have put a little effort into creating the mix.

From the evidence presented here, though, they obviously didn’t. Surround action is minimal, and the low end apparently stepped out for lunch. Both the effects and music are lifeless and hollow, and dialogue sounds canned and flat. A French Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 track is also included. English SDH and French subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Alas, no extras whatsoever are included.

FINAL THOUGHT

A better script and a lead with actual acting skills could have made Timecop a passable time waster, but in this form it’s simply not worth it.