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A waste of Timecop.
I saw the Van Damme masterpiece Timecop a few days ago. On reflection, this movie feels like a real wasted opportunity.
I guess I should warn about spoilers but if you haven't seen this after 30 years you're probbly not going to.
It starts of pretty well. A time traveller holds up a squad of confederate soldiers transporting gold. Afterr that it declines. We have a scene in the Whitehouse where the government discuss setting up a time enforcement agency. The scene serves no story telling purpose. The basic premise has already been explained by the movie's title. He's a cop who travels in time - a Timecop if you will.
So after another scene where we establish the character of Max, and then create motivation with the bad guys killing his wife, the movie proper starts. And we get an enjoyable scene just after the wall street crash, where Max tracks down someone who's using knowledge of the future to make a killing on Wall street. We get a gunfight in the stockbroker building and Max arrests the bad guy. All good fun.
After this is where it all seems to lose the plot. We don't have a lot of fun with time travel after this. It becomes a pretty dumb action movie with Max chasing after a fairly non-descript villain and time travel not really being particularly relevant.
Time travel needs to be more than just a backdrop. Good time travel movies use the device in interesting way - either to take our characters to an interesting time to have adventures there, or to have complex dilemmas caused by time travel itself.
Couldn't they have done something a lot more interesting with the premise? It would have been more fun to chase a bunch of villains through different times. Instead, the bulk of the action happens in 1994. This is not what we want in a movie with "Time" in its name. If you're going to have time traveller s in the present they need to come from a more interesting time than the near future. Terminator had a time traveller from a bleak future where Humanity was fighting a war against robot opressors. Timecop is the near furture where not much has changed except cars look weird.
The movie had a spin off TV series. I never actually saw it but at least it had a bit of fun with the premise. We have a villain going back in time and taking hte place of Jack the Ripper, and another that wants to help Germany win WW2. Unfortunately the series was very by the book and was cancelled after 9 episodes due to being a bit crap.
The villain in the movie wants to get rich and become president. This is a very boring motivation. It lacks ambition. Ruling the world would be fun. Changing history because of some weird ideology would be good. Money? There are any number of silicon valley startups that are household names, that would have offered hundreds or thousands of times profit. If you have a time machine, you don't need to be evil to be rich! Worst of all, we find out out this in the first 30 minutes or so. There's not even the mystery to keep us entertained.
This is an idea that could work. It's never going to be an Oscar worthy film, but it's certainly something that should mke a good action movie. Maybe it's time for a remake.
I guess I should warn about spoilers but if you haven't seen this after 30 years you're probbly not going to.
It starts of pretty well. A time traveller holds up a squad of confederate soldiers transporting gold. Afterr that it declines. We have a scene in the Whitehouse where the government discuss setting up a time enforcement agency. The scene serves no story telling purpose. The basic premise has already been explained by the movie's title. He's a cop who travels in time - a Timecop if you will.
So after another scene where we establish the character of Max, and then create motivation with the bad guys killing his wife, the movie proper starts. And we get an enjoyable scene just after the wall street crash, where Max tracks down someone who's using knowledge of the future to make a killing on Wall street. We get a gunfight in the stockbroker building and Max arrests the bad guy. All good fun.
After this is where it all seems to lose the plot. We don't have a lot of fun with time travel after this. It becomes a pretty dumb action movie with Max chasing after a fairly non-descript villain and time travel not really being particularly relevant.
Time travel needs to be more than just a backdrop. Good time travel movies use the device in interesting way - either to take our characters to an interesting time to have adventures there, or to have complex dilemmas caused by time travel itself.
Couldn't they have done something a lot more interesting with the premise? It would have been more fun to chase a bunch of villains through different times. Instead, the bulk of the action happens in 1994. This is not what we want in a movie with "Time" in its name. If you're going to have time traveller s in the present they need to come from a more interesting time than the near future. Terminator had a time traveller from a bleak future where Humanity was fighting a war against robot opressors. Timecop is the near furture where not much has changed except cars look weird.
The movie had a spin off TV series. I never actually saw it but at least it had a bit of fun with the premise. We have a villain going back in time and taking hte place of Jack the Ripper, and another that wants to help Germany win WW2. Unfortunately the series was very by the book and was cancelled after 9 episodes due to being a bit crap.
The villain in the movie wants to get rich and become president. This is a very boring motivation. It lacks ambition. Ruling the world would be fun. Changing history because of some weird ideology would be good. Money? There are any number of silicon valley startups that are household names, that would have offered hundreds or thousands of times profit. If you have a time machine, you don't need to be evil to be rich! Worst of all, we find out out this in the first 30 minutes or so. There's not even the mystery to keep us entertained.
This is an idea that could work. It's never going to be an Oscar worthy film, but it's certainly something that should mke a good action movie. Maybe it's time for a remake.