I am lost in this timewarp

TIMECOP (1994)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

An average Jean Claude Van Damme picture doesn't make it his best, it just means it is average. I have seen Van Damme in other action pictures, some reasonable and some are forgettable, but this "Timecop" is far too diluted from the usual Van Damme picture and has no ambition to fulfill its neat premise. I am not sure we should question time-travel logic but this movie has far too many inconsistencies and tumbles over itself one too many times.

Van Damme is Max Walker, a timecop, literally a cop who travels through time to prevent greedy people from his future (the year 2004) from tampering with the past. Max is saddled with a greedy partner of his, Atwood (Jason Schombing), who travels to the 1920's to make stock deals that he knows will go through the roof in the future. Atwood meets his comeuppance rather quickly. The corporatist Senator McComb (Ron Silver, disarmingly evil) oversees a commission to regulate time-travel after an opening sequence shows someone else from the future stealing gold bullion from Confederates to buy arms in the future! You follow? Let's just say that McComb has designs on his future where the 10% get to control everything and the other 90% can go to Mexico and live more comfortably. You know, I never saw "Timecop" in 1994 but I would say that McComb definitely had a good idea of the future of America in 2014 - his only flaw is that actually the richest 1% own everything, not 10. Did he not see 1987's "Wall Street"?

"Timecop" faces far too many contrivances in its narrative which jumps around a little too frenetically. It wants to be a love story between Max and his wife (Mia Sara - defining thanklessness) who face an uncertain future - both Van Damme and Sara are about as convincing a couple as C3P0 and Lisa Simpson, if they ever got it on. Then there is the introduction of Gloria Reuben as Max's new partner that almost develops into a buddy-buddy action picture but then becomes a case of betrayal. Then we get Van Damme in some of the most elongated fight scenes I've ever seen, mostly edited with a sledgehammer. It is not enough to deliver a kick in a master shot, it has to be seen in close-up as well, and it just got on my nerves to see such herky-jerky fighting. The rain-soaked finale has endless fight scenes as well. We expect Van Damme to kick and punch his enemies but it grows weary after a while.

"Timecop" also lost me with its time-travel technology (thanks to Roger Ebert who brought this up in his review) - McComb and his minions use a gadget that allows them to materialize from a wormhole of sorts to another like plasma. The timecops use a rocket car that takes much longer to travel than the gadget. Huh? Overall, the movie has a fascinating premise - a government-funded Time Enforcement Commission to battle greedy evildoers from changing the past - but it is actually a Van Damme martial-arts picture where he has to save his wife from killers. In other words, average.