Jean-Claude Van Damme has made a lot of movies, and many of them are … not great. But then there are the handful of gems in Van Damme’s action-packed career. I’m sure everyone has their own personal favorite, and mine is “Timecop,” Peter Hyams’ delightfully ridiculous sci-fi action pic (a potential remake was announced back in 2014 but thankfully has never happened). I mean, first of all, the movie is called “Timecop.” It’s hard to resist a movie with a title like that, especially when the film itself delivers exactly what is being advertised: a cop who travels through time.
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“Timecop” was based on a comic book series, but since I’ve never read that, I’m not going to comment on it. Instead, I’ll talk about the movie, which now has a new 4K release from the good folks at Shout Factory. I got to revisit the film for this new 4K release, which lead me to the movie’s original theatrical review from the legendary Roger Ebert. Reading this review, in turn, lead to something surprising: a direct, seemingly impossible connection to a completely different time travel movie.
But I’ll get to that momentarily.
Timecop is one of Van Damme’s most enjoyable movies
Set in the distant future of 2004 (!), “Timecop” introduces us to a world where time travel exists. As is the case with most time travel movies, there are some rules. During a very entertaining exposition dump at the start of the film (delivered expertly by actor Scott Lawrence), we learn that you can travel back in time into the past, but you can’t travel forward into the future, because the future hasn’t happened yet. Of course, this immediately causes a paradox: if you travel back in time, how can you travel back to the future, aka your present, if you can’t travel forward?
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The answer: it doesn’t matter. “Timecop” is not really concerned with logic. It just wants to use its big, goofy premise and have some fun. And it does. Van Damme plays Max Walker, a cop who works for the Time Enforcement Commission (TEC), which is tasked with policing time travel. You see, if time travel exists, it stands to reason that some bad actors will try to use it for nefarious ways. The punishment for doing this is extreme: anyone caught futzing about with time is sentenced to death.
Max’s wife, Melissa (Mia Sara), was murdered a few years ago, so I bet you can guess where things are going: Max will eventually use time travel to save Melissa’s life. But first he has to deal with the wonderfully evil Senator Aaron McComb, played with delicious smugness by the late Ron Silver. McComb plans to use time travel to both get rich and become the President of the United States. An evil president?! Talk about far-fetched!
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Timecop is silly, and that’s what makes it fun
I first saw “Timecop” when it hit VHS (I’m old) back in the mid-’90s, and I was a fan, in the way that adolescent boys are fans of movies with lots of punching and kicking and shooting. Revisiting the film now in 4K, I remain a fan, although I can see how silly the movie is. But that’s not a knock against “Timecop” — indeed, the silliness makes the movie all the more enjoyable.
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Nothing here really makes sense. The TEC is all about maintaining the existing timeline and not interfering with the past, and yet, the very act of sending Max back in time to do Timecop stuff is, of course, interfering with the past. Early in the movie, Max heads back to the 1920s and engages in a big fight with his ex-partner, who has gone rogue to manipulate the stock market. Lots of stuff blows up and the bad guy literally gets thrown off a building to his death. Sure seems like this event is, by default, changing the past! Isn’t that a problem?
Or, how about this. To travel back in time, Max has to get inside of a car that’s sitting on a rail, kind of like an amusement park ride. The vehicle is then launched down a runway and eventually sends Max back in time. At the end of the runway is a big brick wall, and we’re told that if the time machine doesn’t work, the vehicle will slam into that brick wall and kill the occupant — it’s happened before. But why put the brick wall there to begin with? You could easily avoid this danger! On top of all that, whenever Max travels back in time, the little time travel car he’s in vanishes; he just shows up in the past. Then, when Max returns to the future (aka his present), he does so via the car. How? Again: it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we get to watch Van Damme do some splits and kill some bad guys.
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Roger Ebert’s Timecop review somehow saw into the future
As I mentioned above, rewatching “Timecop” lead me to Roger Ebert’s review of the film, published back in 1994. Whenever I watch or rewatch an older film, I usually seek out Ebert’s review – Ebert was one of the best to ever do it, and I value his insight and wisdom (something that’s deeply lacking in our current film review landscape).
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Ebert gave “Timecop” 2 stars out of 4, which was fair. But it was final paragraph of Ebert’s review that really caught my attention. Ebert compares “Timecop” to another famous time travel sci-fi franchise: “Terminator.” As he closes out his review, he writes:
“It’s not so much that the premise of the original ‘Terminator’ has been ripped off, as that Hollywood went traveling into the past and inalterably ripped the fabric of time, and that’s why we got ‘Timecop’ with Van Damme instead of ‘Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines’ with Schwarzenegger. You see what can happen.”
Here, I did a double-take. Ebert is talking about a hypothetical third “Terminator” movie, which he (jokingly) calls “Rise Of The Machines.” But of course, “Terminator 3,” (aka the third-best “Terminator” movie) would eventually be made — and when it was, it was indeed called “Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines.” But here’s the thing: that movie didn’t come out until 2003, almost a full decade after Ebert’s “Timecop” review. Some quick research indicates an early script for “Terminator 3” subtitled “Rise Of The Machines” popped-up as early as 1997, but that’s still a few years after Ebert’s “Timecop” review.
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In other words, Roger Ebert somehow accurately predicted the title of “Terminator 3.” Is this a coincidence? Or did Ebert somehow travel through time himself, just like Van Damme’s Max, and learn the truth? Of course, we all know that’s impossible — Ebert would’ve had to travel into the future, and as “Timecop” taught us, that can’t happen.
You can buy “Timecop” on 4K here.
