Film is Pwn

Timecop is the masterpiece of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s action oeuvre . . . which doesn’t say that much.

The science fiction device in the case of Timecop is, obviously, invading alien hordes with watermelons for heads who can only be stopped by kickboxing.  I kid, of course. Timecop is about time travel.  For those of you hoping the topic would be “raptors,” let’s hope Mr. Van Damme signs on to my latest project, “Kickboxer vs. Raptors on Vampire Mountain.”  We’re still in preliminary negotiations with Van Damme; Ron Howard is attached to direct.

I actually like Timecop — hopefully that doesn’t cost me what little credibility I’ve built up the past few months.  Is it’s plot hole-free or it’s pseudo-movie-science logically sound?  No, of course not, I can’t believe you asked me that . . . moron.

In Timecop, we are asked to believe that time travel has become a reality and it is being used for nefarious reasons to plunder the past.  The film opens with a robbery of Confederate gold from 1865 by a single man equipped with futuristic weaponry that destroys Johnny Reb and his cohorts, thus providing another in an endless series of excuses for the South as to why they lost The War of Northern Aggression: The North’s superior manpower, lack of material resources in the South, Grant’s military brilliance helping the North, time traveling bandits from the future with ray guns . . .

Of course this unauthorized time travel is detected, and the government swings into action with a new agency to police time travel.  Just like the government, a couple criminals go back in time and risk destroying the space-time continuum and all of a sudden you need a whole new government agency.  I can’t believe my fictional tax dollars are being spent so frivolously!  I want my fictional tax dollars to go to some good old fashioned mad sciencing, like cloning dinosaurs or curing every known disease by breeding mutant sharks.  (Incidentally, what’s the worst that can happen if time travel goes unregulated?  Casper Van Dien wandering around Pompei?)

The late, great Ron Silver is the scheming, Senator McComb, who jumps at the chance to head the oversight committee for the newly formed Timecop unit.  McComb is the villain, who years later is the one sending his veritable army of ruthless killers (or, the technical term, “assistants”) to go into the past to garner him enough ill-gotten time cash to finance his run for Presidency.  This is creates another potential application for time travel: Campaign Finance Reform.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is Max Walker, a Washington DC police officer recruited to be a timecop in the outset of the project.  The first day Max learns of his new assignment, he and his lovely wife Melissa (Mia Sara) are ambushed in their palatial, country estate by mysterious goons – Max is shot but survives, though his wife is killed.

Years later, Max has poured himself into timecoppering, and he is doggedly pursuing the rampaging goons (or, “Senator’s aids”, if you will) of McComb, and he is dangerously close to pinning the crime’s on the man who could be the next President of the United States.  This is, of course, when the Senator sends people to kill Max in the past, which is the incident that has already occurred where his wife died.

As luck would have it, Max and his new partner Sarah (Gloria Reuben) are sent back to investigate the time ripple that leads to his wife’s death, so we get yet another movie with multiple Van Dammes wandering around on screen.  But, we do get two Ron Silvers, so that is an even trade-off.

One of the time travel rules is, changes made in the past will be acceped facts when you return to the present.  I.e., if you go back and steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London in 1899, the crown jewels will have always been stolen in 1879 for all anyone knows.  So it’s a little unclear how Max could know his wife was killed when the thugs who went back and killed his wife hadn’t done it yet, as the reality Max was in shouldn’t exist until it happened, right?

For that matter, how then can Timecops know when anyone’s done anything unusual?  Even if they can detect when there’s a “time ripple,” everything’s always been the same after time’s been changed, right?  The Statue of Liberty always had that mustache, Mount Rushmore always had Grover Cleveland on it, and a young Yanni was always persuaded not to pursue a career in music.

Unless you do something like absurd, like take some exclusive, provocative photographs of Cleopatra or frame a picture of you and Leonardo Da Vinci on your office wall, getting away with the crime should be pretty doggone easy.

*Sigh* In the end, Timecop doesn’t hold up logically or scientifically, and I doubt Timecop could qualify for its own Mythbusters special (and those guys have even done “Wanted’s curving bullets myth” and “How plausible is the ridiculous, exploding shark finale from Deep Blue Sea”)!  Still, it’s a fun ride if you can turn your brain off, or, if you’re like me an your brain did not come with an “on” switch.  Timecop is the best of the Van Damme action movies, which doesn’t say too much.  (I exclude the genuinely GOOD film JCVD, where Van Damme plays the role he was born to play, namely himself, because that isn’t al “Van Damme movie” per se, but a brilliantly concocted film incorporating Van Damme.)

–Daniel J. Roos