TIMECOP
A film review by W. Yacco
Copyright 1994 W. Yacco
Aside from serving principally as a means of connecting between the fight-scene dots, the TIMECOP plot does nothing but suffer in it's exposition. You do come to understand that there's a conspiracy, and if you're quick, or are already familiar with sci-fi time-travel plotting, you'll probably pick up on the seemingly unmotivated early action involving unexplained characters. No, the problem isn't that the movement loses the viewer so much as that it never captivates the viewer or generates any real involvement with either the characters or the story.
Can you care about the quest to save a wife you've barely met, and whose relationship to the hero is barley developed? It's not likely under the best circumstances, but the story isn't about such a quest until the very end. In fact, only two characters have more than a single dimension: Van Damme's hero and Ron Silver's arch-villain. Yet other than a few sneers, even their interaction starts late in the film. What TIMECOP needs is a something at the outset that the audience can look forward to throughout the film. But there's nothing: no mystery, no conflict, no holy grail, nothing but one almost incidental battle after another.
If there had only been something to care about, you might even be willing to suspend your disbelief enough to accept the preposterously amateur boxes-on-wheels that are supposed to pass for vehicles of the future. For that matter, you might also overlook some of the staging. For example, the time-travel concept, lifted whole cloth from BACK TO THE FUTURE, has time travelers being propelled into whenever on a rocket sled. What makes it particularly ludicrous is that the tracks are deliberately built up to a wall in an effort to force a sense of jeopardy. At least in BACK TO THE FUTURE, when the car ran out of road, it didn't seem to have been planned in advance.
Still, TIMECOP is better than a lot of films in either of the genres it mixes. It doesn't really go anywhere, but at least it isn't terribly tedious while it doesn't go there. And even if Van Damme can't rival Steven Segal in UNDER SIEGE (okay, so Segal can't rival Segal in UNDER SIEGE either. Sue me.), at least he isn't completely wooden. And Ron Silver reeks some of his usual evil as well.
On my one-to-four lizard scale, TIMECOP rates a one and a half.
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