Search - Timecop on DVD

Enjoyable despite inconsistencies (but full-screen?)

John S. Ryan | Silver Lake, OH | 12/31/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Apart from the _Terminator_ series, there haven't been all that many SF time-travel action thrillers. There have been time-travel _movies_, but they're generally not action flicks. (_Somewhere in Time_, for example, is primarily a romance, and the brilliant _12 Monkeys_ isn't about "action.") Of course there's Nicholas Meyer's excellent _Time After Time_, which isn't as well known as it should be.

And there's this one. It's not (just) a Van Damme vehicle, though it works well enough for fans of the Muscles from Brussels. It's also a fairly well constructed and enjoyable SF movie.

SF readers be warned: it does _not_ have the logical tightness of Robert A. Heinlein's early time-travel stories ('By His Bootstraps', 'All You Zombies'), or even of the first _Terminator_ film. But as Heinlein found in later life, an unalterable past/future just doesn't make for very exciting drama. (As of _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_, RAH was officially allowing the past, and therefore the future, to be changed.)

For this film, director Peter Hyams and screenwriters Mark Verheiden and Mark Richardson (also the writers of the Dark Horse comic on which the film is based) borrow liberally but loosely from Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. Since (according to this scheme) a physically feasible means of time travel not only exists but can be used to change the past, there will be all sorts of baddies around who will try to adjust things to their own advantage. So there will have to be some time-travel cops who intervene to preserve the 'real' timestream.

Van Damme is one such cop. And in this film he's pitted against Ron Silver, well cast as a crooked politician who wants to rearrange things so that he becomes dictator of America.

Even if you buy the theory of time travel involved here, you've still got some camels to swallow. What, for example, is this nonsense about people exploding if they come into physical contact with their earlier or later selves? The physical explanation given for it in the film is just silly, not only according to 'real' physics but even on the film's own internal logic.

But if you can manage to rationalize this stuff (or at least suspend incredulity long enough to watch the thing), you'll find a well crafted SF drama that succeeds extremely well in its strictly dramatic aspects. And you don't have to be a Van Damme fan to enjoy it. (People who criticize Van Damme's acting may not have seen this movie or some of his more recent work. He's not Olivier or anything, but for this sort of movie, he's _way_ better than his detractors like to admit.)

I'm deducting a star for the full-screen format of the DVD release. Let's see this thing in widescreen, shall we?"

Fantastic Movie For Its Type

Warren E. Meth | 08/25/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I think that for a movie that professes to be nothing more than what it is this movie rates high. It is pure science fiction, action. escapism. Nothing more - nothing less. It is pure entertainment. All right so its hard to understand Jean-Claude all the time but they gave him a superlative supporting cast of actors, especially Ron Silver who is always good, who basically carry the movie. The martial arts were kept controlled to the story line and there actually was a story. This movie was not meant to explore the deeper meaning of life. For that go see "The Big Sleep" with Humphrey Bogart. For pure entertainment
get this one. In my opinion Jean-Claude's best movie, through no fault of his own. A great flick. For those nay-sayers out there GET A GRIP."