Timecop
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Movie Reviews of Timecop
Movie Review: Action packed and just plain fun to watch
Summary: 5 Stars
By far the best Van Dammne movie. It has an action packed plot and good story. Hey, even my wife enjoys watching this one.Movie Review: WHERE'S THE WIDESCREEN VERSION
Summary: 5 Stars
THIS WAS A GREAT VAN DAMME MOVIE BUT WITHOUT A WIDESCREEN EDITION AVAVABLE, I WOULDN'T BUY IT.Movie Review: "There's Never Enough Time..."
Summary: 4 Stars
Plotwise: Max Walker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) Is a Time Enforcement Commission (TEC) Agent in 2004. Ten years ago, his wife Melissa (Mia Sara) was killed in a raid on their home. Max is haunted by her memory, and tormented by the fact that the power to go back in time and save her is in his hands. But that's not the point of the TEC: they're here to stop people with time-travel power from altering history in their own personal interests.
Max, on a mission to capture ex-partner Lyle Atwood (Jason Schombing), discovers that rising Senator and Presidential Nominee Aaron McComb (Ron Silver) is hoarding money for his campaign from the past. The plot thickens when Max discovers that McComb might have changed the past to cause Melissa's death. Suddenly, it might seem that time is no longer on Max's side...
Review: As anyone can tell you, this is undoubtedly one of Van Damme's best. Action director Peter Hyams (2010, Outland) creates a believable enough 2004, considering the budget constraints. The special effects, while fairly obvious-looking now, aren't too bad, particularly when a future McComb is on-screen at the same time as the past McComb. Of course the real draw in a Van Damme film is the fighting, which is actually in a lesser amount, but when the action kicks in it's pretty entertaining, though Van Damme's one-liners become hackneyed and annoying. The fast-paced editing makes for tense and bruising fights, with some creatively violent touches.
Most people would not watch a Van Damme film to see him act (except perhaps his recent "Until Death"), but like his newer films, he shows that he is very adept at playing down-and-out. The death of his wife having seriously damaged him, Max Walker is a man trying to find his way again, but only becoming more disillusioned.
As McComb, Ron Silver is wonderfully slimy in the future, and nicely confused in the past. Mia Sara has little to do but be in distress, or the object of Van Damme's interest. The supporting cast, including the great Bruce McGill and Gloria Reuben, are good at supporting the main players.
Of course, "Van Damme's best" doesn't mean a whole lot, considering some of the crap he's done, and this film is not a whole lot more then a decent action/sci-fi film. The plot, while clever at times, defies logic at others and becomes pretty idiotic. The dialogue, while smart at times, is forced at others, particularly (as I already said) Van Damme's one-liners. Van Damme makes for a better hero when he's clearly the villain's bitch, not when he's in total control. For instance, in the second Hyams/Van Damme collaboration, "Sudden Death," Van Damme spends more time running away than fighting, which made for a more interesting hero. He does so once or twice here, but when laying down the law he becomes a cocky smartass.
But what am I saying? This is, on the whole, a good Van Damme movie, and for that reason it should be seen at least once, for fans of action in general. I'd also recommend "Hard Target," "Sudden Death," and "Double Impact."
On a scale of 1 to 10, this film gets an 8.
On a scale of 0.0 to 10.0, this film gets a 7.8.
On a scale of A to F, this film gets a B-.
On a scale of 0 to 5, this film gets a 4.
On a scale of 0 to 4, this film gets a 3.
If you didn't get it yet: any action fan should see this film.
Content-wise: Being an action film, and considering the fact that Van Damme has never made a film rated anything but R, expect all sorts of violent action here. A handful of people do get shot, or knocked around, of course, but there are some more creative deaths, such as a guy having his nitrogen-coated arm kicked off (cheesy FX), or two people fusing together and imploding (not too bad). There is one brief, tasteful sex scene, and some fairly graphic nudity, certainly not for the younger set. There is some brief language, but no worse than any other action film.
Movie Review: "Never interrupt me when I'm talking to myself."
Summary: 4 Stars
I have to get my Mia Sara where I can get it, what with her not having that many films in her ouevre. And if that means sitting thru a Jean-Claude Van Damme picture, so be it. Good thing then that TIMECOP happens to be one of the best films the Muscles from Brussels had ever helicopter kicked his way in. And, plus, there's time travel, possibly my favorite sci-fi plot device. I love me some time travel.
Van Damme plays a character with the very Belgian-sounding name of Max Walker. In the year 2004 Walker is an operative for the Time Enforcement Commission (TEC). On the crime-stopping angle, Walker finds himself trying to stymie the horrific ambitions of corrupt senator Aaron McComb (Ron Silver). But the emotional heft relies on Walker's palpable loneliness and lingering hurt from losing his wife ten years ago, when she was murdered. Would you be surprised to learn that a chance surfaces in which Walker can alter the past and save his wife? The moral quandary for Walker is that tampering with time travel is the very thing he's tasked to prevent.
Who knew Van Damme could do "world-weary" so well? Or maybe the then fabricated grey in his temple makes him more convincing. This was when Van Damme was in his physical prime and so the action scenes are very decent. Van Damme's heyday was in the early '90s when he churned out films that were van damn entertaining (DEATH WARRANT, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, HARD TARGET, NOWHERE TO RUN). TIMECOP, having come out in 1994, was the last good one before his career started crappping out and he was forced to start exploring the wonderful world of made-for-cable cinema. TIMECOP is a solid sci-fi thriller. It's even got a touching love story.
"Changing the past will have dire consequences." "The same matter can't occupy space at the same time." You hear stuff like that and you know that time travel is in the house. I hesitate to go into it more because that would spoilerize things, but the film comes up with some pretty neat perspective shifts tied into the time travel element. One rather nifty instance of temporal cause and effect is when Walker travels to the past and bloodies Senator McComb in the face, only to have a corresponding scar suddenly appearing on the face of the present-day McComb (who had also traveled to the past to see his younger self).
Not that I'm some cruel critical fashionista, but nowadays I try not to judge too harshly those awful futuristic outfits as designed in the 1990s, and I never did think too fondly of Van Damme's sleeves brushed all the way up the wrists look. Van Damme, as I've said, turns in a strong dramatic performance even if he doesn't quite share Schwarzenegger's panache with the one-liners. In fact there's one scene in which Gloria Reuben's character accuses Van Damme: "You're not funny." To which, Van Damme replies: "I'm never funny." Truer words, Jean-Claude, truer words... Still, the Muscles from Brussels has got that helicopter kick thing going on, and that crazy forehead knot. Now even Schwarzenegger has those claims to fame. TIME COP isn't near to being the best time travel yarn to ever be spun, but it's an entertaining, watchable effort. We get to see what Gainesville, Georgia was like for a moment back in 1893, and Wall Street in the throes of the Great Depression in 1929. And TIMECOP has the answer if you're curious about what the year 2004 has in store for us. Never mind that it's already 2010.
And Mia Sara is in this one.
Movie Review: Enjoyable despite inconsistencies (but full-screen?)
Summary: 4 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?