Timecop

Rating:
Summary: Interesting movie
Review: Most of Van Dammes movies have some aspect that gets on my nerves as being hokey, but this one is an exception. It looks more realistic in the fights that everyone gets the crap beat out of them, yet add some good special FX. It's worth a look to decide for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Time enough for love
Review: Once again I find myself swimming against the tide of critical opinion. Can I help it if I like action films? Should I be ashamed? These are rhetorical questions so don't trouble your frontal lobe. I'm sick of hearing films being trashed simply because they happen to star an actor more known for muscle mass than theatrical prowess. If the later was the only measure of quality, Laurence Olivier's movies would have all been financial blockbusters.

And who could better epitomize action heroes than the man dubbed "The Muscles from Brussels"? Yes, I'm referring to Jean-Claude Van Damme. He manages to get the lion's share of the screen in "Timecop". In some cases we're doubly Dammed when he goes back in time and meets himself. After all, this is a science fiction film. Time travel is the central plot device and it is used very well throughout the story.

I suppose the SCI-FI die-hards among us will cringe at yet another use of that hoary old question, "What would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather?" Luckily the screenwriters were a little more grounded in reality. Why trouble our grandparents when we could make a quick buck. Isn't that the first thing most folks would turn their time traveling adventure into; a chance to score some serious coin?

Which is were the main villain comes in. Senator Aaron McComb wants to be the president but his less than charming personality would, under normal circumstances, preclude any chance of election. But all he really needs is enormous piles of cash in order to buy sufficient air-time to sway the mindless masses. Luckily, he is on the oversight committee that monitors the Temporal Enforcement Agency, or Timecops as they are known to themselves.

The evil Senator's plans for world domination seem to be going very smoothly until headstrong Max Walker, (Van Damme), brings one of the politician's henchmen to justice. From that point on, good and evil fight a running skirmish through time. The trick is to change the past in such a way as to prevent a counter-strike by the other side. And it is this convoluted logic which makes the film so engrossing.

The effects and set designs are very good but with enough scientific flubs to keep the purist grinding his teeth. Personally, I had a ball. This movie doesn't have the tension of a Terminator flick, or the depth of a Kubrik brain fest. What is does have is action, high kicking action that only pauses long enough to squeeze in a little lost love pathos. So if you like your SCI-FI hard and fast, give Jean-Claude another chance and watch Timecop.

Rating:
Summary: one is for no widescreen version
Review: Once again, we're stuck with a full screen version of a movie that deserved better then what it got. As with "The Shadow", this is a decent little movie. It's not going to win any awards but it will certainly keep you entertained. Nice premise and decent Van Damme presence (I don't want to call it "acting"), but once again the studio decides to go on the cheap and not even give us a decent letterboxed version.

Rating:
Summary: one is for no widescreen version
Review: Once again, we're stuck with a full screen version of a movie that deserved better then what it got. As with "The Shadow", this is a decent little movie. It's not going to win any awards but it will certainly keep you entertained. Nice premise and decent Van Damme presence (I don't want to call it "acting"), but once again the studio decides to go on the cheap and not even give us a decent letterboxed version.

Rating:
Summary: Time travel with the muscles from Brussels
Review: Pretty decent flick, I actually give it 3.5 stars. A nice, quick sci-fi b-movie with some good action, decent f/x and some subpar acting(of course). Great villian in Ron Silver and Van Damme tries but the film could have been upped a notch with a better lead. Some lapses in logic but are forgivable due to the fact that no one knows what kind of results would be reaped when playing with time. All and all a fun adventure if looking for a quick flick.

Rating:
Summary: Van Damme's Best
Review: The funny thing about this movie (that often ends up in the cut-out bins at any video store) is that it was actually Van Damme's highest-grossing film, and one of his only films that actually drew some rave reviews.

Not about his acting, mind you; that was never a JCVD selling point. But Peter Hyams ("Outland", "2010") steered Van Damme into a solid action sci-fi thriller, gave the plot enough technical jargon to suspend disbelief, some quality T&A (Mia Sara, looking hotter than hell), and (as with the case with Van Damme's best films) gave the best lines to the supporting actors.

Ron Silver has a great time as the antagonist--and plays off Jean Claude pretty well. Avoiding all the plot loopholes and illogical physics, paying attention to the money that was spent on this film, and basically comparing it to all the other actioners at the time enables me to give it a 4 star rating.

Rating:
Summary: VanDamme's BEST!
Review: This is easily one of the best Jean Claude Van Damme has done. I have other favorites (Universal Soldier, Cyborg etc), but I could watch this one over & over again!

Rating:
Summary: Typical VanDamme movie w/ splits.
Review: This is one of his better movies. Good action. Interesting Sci-Fi

Rating:
Summary: More holes than swiss cheese
Review: This is perhaps one of the worst science-fiction movies I've seen in a long, long time.

Jean-Claude Van Damme plays an officer in the Time Enforcement Police, and agency established to keep people from going back in time and manipulating the past. Even though this movie was made in 1994, the producers had an amazing amount of faith that in a mere 10 years time (i.e., prior to 2004, when this movie is set), we'd have perfected the ability to travel through time. The job of the Time Enforcement Police is, in essence, to keep people from traveling back in time and betting their life savings on the 1963 World Series while already knowing the outcome, thereby affecting the future (or rather, the present) as we know it in ways we can't predict. Ron Silver plays the bad guy, a corrupt politician who sees the ability to go into the past as a way of financing a lucrative and powerful future for himself.

There's plenty about this movie that I found to be totally [bad]. For one, the movie feels the need to establish the point that you can't go forward in time, only backward, since the future hasn't been written yet. It's sort of a silly plot device when you consider that the characters, once they've gone back in time, have to return forward again to what was once the present but is now the future since they're in the past. And though the present had once been written, when you consider that even the smallest change taking place in the past, the future (i.e., the present that once was) is no longer written in stone. An episode of The Simpsons had great fun with that plot device, as Homer went back in time, took one step onto one tiny plant, and changed the future to the point it even rained doughnuts. So in essence, this movie is completely silly because they take such care in establishing physical laws that they have no intent of adhering to. But it sounded nice when they said it.

Another plot element that plays a critical part in this movie, and is completely silly ' the same matter can't occupy the same space at the same time. Just a fancy way of saying if you go back in time to a period where you existed normally, you can't make physical contact with yourself or bad things will happen. Now this is silly for two reasons ' number one, no two pieces of matter can occupy the same space at the same time; it's a physical impossibility. They can occupy the space immediately adjacent, but not the same space. If you don't think this is true, try standing exactly where someone is already standing while they are still standing there ' one will have to give up the space for the other.

The other reason this is a silly rule is that it believes that a living thing is the same matter even after 10 years has passed. I was under the impression that after a 10 year period, nearly every cell in my body would have died off and re-generated; I might be the same person, but I'm no longer physically the same matter. I'm more of a cell-by-cell clone of the person I once was; so are you telling me that a cloned sheep can't make physical contact with the sheep it was cloned from, or bad things will happen?

There's also lots of little things, like how the agents of the Time Enforcement Police leave their current time sitting in a car, and arrive where they're going standing up, no car. And it just sort of happens, poof, that they change their stance. Never felt right. Also, there's one point in the movie where because of events of the past being changed, Van Damme returns to find his boss thinks he's an imposter because he doesn't recognize him as a TEP agent. Seems to me that if you work in an agency that deals with the possibility that time can be manipulated, you would automatically be more accepting that someone saying they're an agent of yours just returning from a mission might actually be what they say, whether you remember it to be true or not ' you can't be sure if the timeline has altered or not. And then the question is, how do you actually track changes in the timeline from within a timeline that's being changed, i.e., how do you know that the past was manipulated if your present is affected by the change? The TEP somehow tracks the changes to the timeline so they can know when and where to send their agents, but as already expressed, there are times Van Damme returns to find a different present, and the residents of the present unaware of the change.

There is one saving grace to this movie, and that's the moral dilemma that Van Damme has to face when he has to go back in time to the day before his wife is killed ' does he warn his former self of his wife's impending death so she can be saved?

I love a good time-travel movie, don't get me wrong. The original Terminator is one of my favorites, perhaps because it doesn't attempt to explain a lot of the rules the way this movie does, or perhaps because unlike this movie, the manipulation of time isn't the critical plot element of the movie (although admittedly it's required to make the movie work). There are definitely better movies out there that use time travel as a plot device. ...

Rating:
Summary: WHERE'S THE WIDESCREEN VERSION
Review: THIS WAS A GREAT VAN DAMME MOVIE BUT WITHOUT A WIDESCREEN EDITION AVAVABLE, I WOULDN'T BUY IT.