Timecop by Peter Hyams (1994)
Here’s a movie from 1994 in which the villain is a presidential candidate who claims a good president is someone “so rich he doesn’t have to listen to anybody” and who’s popular with both pro-life/pro-death penalty voters and the anti-immigration crowd. That probably did seem wildly fantastical 30 years ago, but here in 2024, it hits a bit too close to home. (Did someone travel back in time to write this script?) Regardless, Timecop’s a pretty entertaining mid-’90s action film by Peter Hyams starring the one and only Jean-Claude Van Damme. (The duo also made the also-entertaining Sudden Death in 1995.) Van Damme’s cop character is tasked with traveling in time to prevent bad guys from messing up the present, which inevitably brings him into conflict with the aforementioned money-grubbing villain (played with all requisite sliminess by Ron Silver). Being a Van Damme film, I wish the fight scenes hadn’t been so heavily edited — they almost resemble the Bourne movies at times — but the Muscles from Brussels delivers an engaging performance, the visual effects hold up pretty well after 30 years (with one notable exception), and there are flashes of visual panache that’s sorely lacking from modern action movies.
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