Product Details

• Actors: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mia Sara, Ron Silver, Gloria Reuben
• Directors: Peter Hyams
• Writers: Mark Verheiden
• Producers: Moshe Diamant, Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Full Screen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Universal Studios
• DVD Release Date: January 20, 1998
• Run Time: 99 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 0783225520
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,975 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "Timecop" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Pay no attention to the fact that Timecop is an insult to intelligent science fiction, and that it gradually succumbs to an acute case of the sillies. It is a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, after all, so check your brain at the door and enjoy this action flick set in the year 2004. Van Damme plays an officer in the Time Enforcement Police, assigned to prevent criminals from traveling to the past with the intent of altering the future. Ron Silver plays the evil politician who plots to retrieve a stockpile of gold from the Civil War to finance his latest campaign. The film is clever to a point, and entertaining if you can ignore the dumb jokes and inconsistencies. Best of all, it's an above-average vehicle for Van Damme (relatively speaking), who gets to kick some villainous butt and share a few scenes with Mia Sara, who plays the Timecop's wife. As Van Damme fans can tell you, this is one of the action star's better movies. --Jeff Shannon

Product Description

A cop from the future travels back in time to stop a presidential candidate from rigging his own election.
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: R
Release Date: 28-MAR-2006
Media Type: DVD

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable despite inconsistencies (but full-screen?) December 31, 2003

By John S. Ryan

Format:DVD

Apart from the _Terminator_ series, there haven't been all that many SF time-travel action thrillers. There have been time-travel _movies_, but they're generally not action flicks. (_Somewhere in Time_, for example, is primarily a romance, and the brilliant _12 Monkeys_ isn't about "action.") Of course there's Nicholas Meyer's excellent _Time After Time_, which isn't as well known as it should be.

And there's this one. It's not (just) a Van Damme vehicle, though it works well enough for fans of the Muscles from Brussels. It's also a fairly well constructed and enjoyable SF movie.

SF readers be warned: it does _not_ have the logical tightness of Robert A. Heinlein's early time-travel stories ('By His Bootstraps', 'All You Zombies'), or even of the first _Terminator_ film. But as Heinlein found in later life, an unalterable past/future just doesn't make for very exciting drama. (As of _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_, RAH was officially allowing the past, and therefore the future, to be changed.)

For this film, director Peter Hyams and screenwriters Mark Verheiden and Mark Richardson (also the writers of the Dark Horse comic on which the film is based) borrow liberally but loosely from Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. Since (according to this scheme) a physically feasible means of time travel not only exists but can be used to change the past, there will be all sorts of baddies around who will try to adjust things to their own advantage. So there will have to be some time-travel cops who intervene to preserve the 'real' timestream.

Van Damme is one such cop. And in this film he's pitted against Ron Silver, well cast as a crooked politician who wants to rearrange things so that he becomes dictator of America.

Even if you buy the theory of time travel involved here, you've still got some camels to swallow. What, for example, is this nonsense about people exploding if they come into physical contact with their earlier or later selves? The physical explanation given for it in the film is just silly, not only according to 'real' physics but even on the film's own internal logic.

But if you can manage to rationalize this stuff (or at least suspend incredulity long enough to watch the thing), you'll find a well crafted SF drama that succeeds extremely well in its strictly dramatic aspects. And you don't have to be a Van Damme fan to enjoy it. (People who criticize Van Damme's acting may not have seen this movie or some of his more recent work. He's not Olivier or anything, but for this sort of movie, he's _way_ better than his detractors like to admit.)

I'm deducting a star for the full-screen format of the DVD release. Let's see this thing in widescreen, shall we?

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How did you get here? March 23, 2008

By Gunner VINE™ VOICE

Format:HD DVD

Time Cop DVD

Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as a time-traveling law enforcement officer whose mission is to prevent and/or apprehend anybody from traveling back in time for their own personal gains. You know that as soon as humans invent Time-Travel someone will be abusing the invention.

Highly recommended for fans of Jean-Claude Van Damme and the book The Time Machine (Signet Classics)

Gunner March, 2008

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Awful pan and scan version! July 21, 2002

By Inspector Gadget

Format:DVD

For a film that was shot in full anamorphic Panavision 2.35:1 by a very good director/cinematographer I find it very weird that Universal would only release this in cropped format. Many other people have expressed their disappointment in other reviews about this but I must let you know that the R2 version IS in widescreen. If you must by this film then get the UK Region 2 version. The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack remains the same but the movie is shown in it's correct OAR. And that is what matters most.