Jean-Claude Van Damme's 1994 Hit Timecop is Dumb Fun As Long as You Don't Think About It Too Hard
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I think we can all agree that the most important year in the history of the universe was 1994. That was the magical time when I turned eighteen, graduated from high school and began college AND Cabin Boy, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Reality Bites, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Ref, Clifford, Red Rock West, Serial Mom, Lion King, PCU, Crooklyn, Fear of a Black Hat, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, True Lies, Fresh, Natural Born Killers, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Ed Wood, Hoop Dreams, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Bullets Over Broadway, The Last Seduction, Stargate, Heavenly Creatures, The Professional, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Dumb and Dumber, Little Women, Nobody’s Fool, Chungking Express and Timecop were all released.
I’ve seen all of those movies except for Timecop so when a kindly patron chose it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I leaped at the opportunity to finally get around to correcting an unforgivable blind spot in my knowledge of film.
I’ve always liked Jean-Claude Van Damme. I interviewed him for A.V Club back in the day and he was an utter delight: candid and funny and colorful and prone to talking about himself in the third person.
For Van Damme, the mid 1990s were the best of times and the worst of times. He was at his peak as an action hero and a bankable box-office attraction but he was also blasted out of his mind on cocaine.
In 1993 he collaborated with director John Woo and producer Sam Raimi on Hard Target, his best film. He reunited with Raimi as a producer a year later for Peter Hyams’ 1994 cult science-fiction action thriller Timecop.
Timecop benefits tremendously from being a product of the greatest film year ever. But it also benefits from being the first Peter Hyams time-travel movie I’ve seen since writing up 2005’s A Sound of Thunder for My World of Flops.
Pretty much any halfway decent film is a goddamn miracle compared to a world-class stinkeroo like Hyams’ disastrous Ray Bradbury adaptation. But Timecop is The Terminator compared to the time-traveling dud that followed over a decade later.
Timecop is Gallant to Sound of Thunder’ Goofus. Timecop has a distinct visual aesthetic rooted in Film Noir as well as classic science fiction and utilizes practical effects and retro-futuristic props that lend the proceedings an earthy physicality. Sound of Thunder, in sharp contrast, drags CGI back at least a decade.
Timecop casts natural-born movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme in one of his best roles. Sound of Thunder stars Ed Burns, who illustrates why he’s no one’s idea of a movie star with a sluggish mistake of a lead performance.
So it’s not surprising that Timecop was one of Van Damme’s biggest hits and has a sizable cult following while Sound of Thunder is mentioned only when the biggest box-office flops of all time are being discussed.
Timecop opens in 1863, with a time-traveler stealing Confederate gold using weapons of the FUTURE for sinister purposes. We then learn that in the world of Timecop, time travel is a thing. That’s honestly not terribly surprising given the film’s title.
Power-mad Senators are informed that time travel is now an impossible reality and are wildly underwhelmed. They’ve just learned something that should upend their sense of reality and permanently change their sense of what’s possible and they mostly seem concerned that preventing a time-travel based apocalypse might lead to budget overruns.
A police force for time travel is nevertheless established so that God’s own United State can fulfill its sacred destiny as the policemen of the world in this exhilarating new world as well.
Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as Agent Max Walker, an absurdly limber Timecop out to prevent the death of his beloved wife Mellisa (Mia Sara) and keep the sinister Senator Aaron McComb (Ron Silver) from robbing the past to pay for his political future by buying the presidency.
The Time Enforcement Commission (or TEC) officer is aided by rock-solid sidekick/best friend Commander Eugene Matuzak (a characteristically terrific Bruce McGill) and Internal Affairs officer Agent Sarah Fielding (Gloria Reuben).
Agent Fielding becomes interested in Agent Walker because his old partner went rogue and chose to use his access to time travel for personal enrichment rather than serving the public good.
A great hero needs a great villain. Timecop has one in Silver’s Senator Aaron McComb. McComb is an oily politician who looks down on the rest of humanity like its something rancid he accidentally stepped in.
Timecop’s larger than life heavy is arrogance personified, a black-hearted pragmatist happy to meddle with the space-time continuum for the sake of power. He’s such an asshole that he even treats himself with dripping disdain and open contempt when he encounters his younger self while fucking with the time stream.
A hard-R, surprisingly gratuitous nudity-filled adaptation of the Dark Horse Comic book of the same name by Mike Richardson (who had a very big 1994 thanks to Timecop and the hit release of another movie based on a Dark Horse comic book, The Mask), and Mark Verheiden, who also co-wrote the screenplay, Timecop combines science fiction and action with the dark, shadow-filled, fatalistic world of Film Noir.
There’s a pleasingly retro clunkiness to the technology here. Hyams, an old hand at science fiction whose filmography includes Capricorn One, Outland and 2010, gives us a vision of the future rooted in the past.
name a more iconic duo!
The props and sets hearken brazenly back to the 1970s and 1980s. If Timecop were made five years later it’d undoubtedly be awash in abysmal CGI but thankfully it was made at the exact right time in the evolution of action and science-fiction movies, before CGI became a lazy default for genre filmmakers the world over.
Timecop makes inspired use of Van Damme’s unique skillset, and not just because it finds multiple excuses for him to do the splits. His wisecracking, ass-kicking hero’s one-liners like “I don’t bake cookies for a living!” and “Maybe he’ll settle down after the election!”, delivered after McComb cold-bloodedly shoots someone I the head, ride the thin line separating clever from stupid, between being genuinely entertaining dialogue and enjoyably idiotic banter.
Timecop isn’t entirely devoid of CGI but what little it employs is agreeably cheesy, particularly the villain’s demise, when our hero literally kicks him into himself, resulting in both incarnations of McComb morphing into a bloody red blob.
Like most movies about time travel, Timecop doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The more you think about its plot, the less sense it makes, which is why I encourage you to simply enjoy Timecop as one of Van Damme’s best vehicles rather than ruining your enjoyment by over-thinking.
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