Customer Reviews

Timecop [VHS]

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

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.

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?

I think that for a movie that professes to be nothing more than what it is this movie rates high. It is pure science fiction, action. escapism. Nothing more - nothing less. It is pure entertainment. All right so its hard to understand Jean-Claude all the time but they gave him a superlative supporting cast of actors, especially Ron Silver who is always good, who basically carry the movie. The martial arts were kept controlled to the story line and there actually was a story. This movie was not meant to explore the deeper meaning of life. For that go see "The Big Sleep" with Humphrey Bogart. For pure entertainment
get this one. In my opinion Jean-Claude's best movie, through no fault of his own. A great flick. For those nay-sayers out there GET A GRIP.

Uh...where is the widescreen version? Its not saying much, but this might be Damn's best film besides Bloodsport, and no widescreen transfer? Hmm....
It's been about 6 years since Timecop was originally released on DVD, time for a new widescreen release!

YES!
I agree with the other reviewers!
This is the one VanDamm movie I LOVE and when I found it in my one used shop I was so extatic I never looked to see screen format! I never though that it would be Full Screen@!#!*!%!!!!!

Ye Gods!
it totally ruins that wonderful sceen in the kitchen of him doing the splits!
Hey ya I'm a red-blooded female...and I can go OUCH at that scene too! that stunt hurts to do and man.....Whistle.....Looks very nice!
The cropping really really ruins the impressive impact of that scene and I've not see the picture since it first came out

it was really a Disappointment when I saw FULL SCREEN

Come on UNIVERSAL!!!

WE WANT WIDE SCREEN!
FULL PICTURE!!!!

this is a fantastic action picture and a crying shame to see it in full screen only!!!!!!

Good movie with great ideas. I wouldn't say this was the best time-travel movie ever made, but it does seem cool for an action movie. Van Damme (actor I'm not a big fan of) seems to be a pretty cool guy in this movie. Most of the movies he makes I really don't like. But this one I think is great and can watch all over again. In the year 1994, time travel is all of a sudden made possible and the President decides to give it out to the government. Officer Max Walker is chosen to be one of the travelers of the force. But bad guys from the future soon learn about it and go back in time to kill him and ruin his life by having his wife murdered after causing his house to explode. 10 years later, Agent Max Walker has been carrying out missions for the force and made a good time-traveler. But he wishes he could go back and prevent the terrible tragedy from happening to his wife. But it is a rule for people to change their own lives and alter the course of history. An evil senator running for president in 2004 is causing schemes by having his henchman go back in time and embezzle money so he can have his polls go up real easily. Max Walker learns about this when the presidential candidate has changed history by having the force shut down and is winning in the election. Walker knows he has to travel back to stop this and sees it as his chance to get his wife back so he can have the happy life he was supposed to have. Excellent Movie!

when i first saw this i was expecting another predictable, timetraveler movie, filmed entiarly in the present time. i was wrong. it was spred out, throughout the past, present and future, and left you guessing till the end.

I love this film when it first come out on the big screen, i have owned the VHS version aswell as the DVD too but when i found out this was coming out on HD DVD, i was baffled as i thought maybe this film would look good in quality as old film transfers dont look the best in 1080p, however, this film looks brillaint in detail, obviouslt dont expect modern HD quality images but for a classic film turned HD, it looks brilliant, better than most old film transfers!
Only grudge is that it doesnt have any special featured :(

Alright, first things first: this movie is by no means great cinema. The plot holes will make you nuts if you think about it too hard and the acting is, well, it's a Van Damme movie, so you know going in that there are no award winning performances. That said, the movie is a whole lot of fun - the action is great, the one liners are cheesy fun and Mia Sara is stunning.
The HD has a good picture, definitely a major improvement over the old standard edition DVD. The old DVD was pan and scan, the HD version is 2.35:1 1080p. The sound is much better as well.
If you've seen it before and liked it, I recommend picking it up. The price is good as well - I expect with the format war nearly over that more HD DVD prices will drop, allowing those of us who took the plunge to at least score some discs on closeout.