(In the quibbles department, one kept wondering what happened to the high-speed vehicles and all the excess velocity that suddenly vanished when people went through the time barrier). Screenwriter Mark Verheiden, a comic-book writer who also wrote same holiday season’s The Mask (1994) and later a producer/writer on tv’s excellent revival of Battlestar Galactica (2003-9) and a number of other shows including Smallville (2001-11), Heroes (2006-10), Constantine (2015) and Daredevil (2015-8), makes the script work exceedingly well and exceedingly consistently. Jean-Claude Van Damme as timecop Max Walker The most effective of these are those that centre around the time editing, like when Jean-Claude Van Damme returns from the past to find the TEC operation all but disbanded, his best friend not knowing him, McComb ahead in the Senatorial race and there no record of his fellow agent and, most intriguingly, the ending where Van Damme returns home to his wife and a son, to a life of ten years that he has never lived. The plot has an ingenious number of twists. In fact, the script did not need to be sold as an action vehicle – although one supposes that that is the way films have to be promoted these days. The film has its requisite level of martial arts punch-ups but the action element never gets in the way of the sharp and intelligent script. And, although Jean-Claude Van Damme and the word acting should never be used in the same sentence, Timecop perhaps comes the closest he has come to doing so yet. In some places, Timecop was being billed as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first stab at serious acting. To some surprise, Timecop is more than that – in fact, one might say it is for Jean-Claude Van Damme what The Terminator (1984) was for Arnold Schwarzenegger, allowing the action star to immerse his persona inside a tightly plotted vehicle.
Perhaps it was the Jean-Cluade Van Damme name above the title on the poster but one went into Timecop with little in the way of expectations, assuming that it would merely be a mindless action vehicle that involved Van Damme throwing his feet about in previous historical eras.
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