Weekend Matinee: TIME COP

It's a holiday weekend and, if you're anything like me, you need something to keep you busy between the long days of BBQs and the glorious nights of fireworks. You're in luck, I got just the thing: the 1994 Jean Claude Van Damme classic TIME COP!



Truth be told, this is probably my favorite Jean Claude movie ever (sorry, Double Team). The story goes that in the distant future of 2004, time travel has been invented and with it a time police force has been created. The best cop on the force is, of course, Jean Claude, a man with a tragic past and nothing to lose. You know, typical action movie stuff. Throughout the movie, the point is made that time is like a lake and any change can cause a ripple through the rest of time and that's where my brain starts to hurt.

So, okay, they establish in the movie that whatever happens in the past is instantly reflected in the future with a scene where a young Ron Silver is cut on the cheek and his older counterpart instantly develops a scar. It occurs to me then, that once someone goes back in time to change things, ideally, the cops would have no idea. Minor infractions, like gaming the stock market or picking up an issue of Action Comics #1, might not have that big of an effect, but bigger things like mass destruction/murder definitely would. So, if a criminal wanted to, couldn't they just shoot a person or two and change the future where the cops came from? Also, if they went back for a few months and raised to prominence, wouldn't the future change so the time cops wouldn't know that they weren't supposed to be there? These are the things that keep me awake at night.

This week's clip, I think, is a great example of this. In it, Jean Claude shows up in 1929 to arrest some time fugitive who has apparently been in the past long enough to become a successful stock broker at a large company. The fugitive resists, resulting in a fist fight turned future gun fight in a very busy office. I can't not believe that this didn't have a major effect on the future. In so much, that I almost believe that every time a time cop went back to stop someone, the future they returned to was a different place than before. It blows my mind if I think about it too much.

Instead, I say we focus on what's important: Jean Claude's knack for dialogue and his huge mullet.



Ahhh.... Good times.