Review // TIMECOP - A rip in time, a tear on my cheek

It's impossible to understate how addicted to 80's action movies I was throughout my childhood. I worshipped at an alter of a four-armed Arnold Schwarzenegger holding Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren and Chuck Norris in his enormous hands. I wrote a fanzine to Arnold and made protest buttons when his movies were rated R. After Bloodsport, I had every Jean Claude Van Damme movie on reserve from my video store before they had left the theatres. I was obsessed.

And then the 90's rolled around and I continued to follow my heroes through their declines, eventually abandoning Seagal and Van Damme when they ran their careers aground on the straight-to-dvd rocks. But the importance of those early films has never diminished. Bloodsport was my entry point into Kung-Fu movies and helped me later find Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Cyborg helped develop my love of trash cinema and Double Impact made my mid-week twelfth birthday a special night (it came to VHS on the same day as my birthday and I insisted on watching it alone, like a solemn coming-of-age ceremony). Action movies were my singular focus growing up and after Arnold, Van Damme was one of the most important figures in that equation.

And so it was that in 1994, on a winters night alone in my house in the middle of nowhere Ontario, I clung to Van Damme's Timecop as I weathered the toughest emotional storm of my life at that time: a messy break-up with a girlfriend. Said girlfriend and I were on-again-off-again at this point and the situation was becoming an intolerable roller coaster ride, a repeating cycle of catch-and-release that was turning me into part basket-case, part crazy person. On that particular wintry '94 night, we were in a limbo state between on-off, I didn't know whether I was being caught again or still in release. She was supposed to call me to "talk". With the portable phone set on the coffee table in plain sight, and ringer volume on high, I popped in the Timecop VHS to kill time before the expected call.

Timecop begins in the 1863, with a mysterious stranger blocking the road and holding up a group of Confederate soldiers transporting gold bullion by horse-drawn carriage. This stranger is played by Canadian Callum Keith Rennie, the first of many Canadian character actors revealing that the movies Washington is actually Vancouver. The stranger produces dual laser-y futuristic machine guns and blows all the soldiers away. Cool! If your movie is about time-travel and takes place in the future, it's always a good idea to start off in the distant past and then mix in your future elements. It's a no-brainer moment, and also the point where Timecop's brains peak--right before the credits.

We are then introduced to the star-crossed lovers that ground Timecop's action in emotional turmoil. Mia Sara of Ferris Bueller, Legend and pretty much nothing else, is looking at watches and clocks in the window of a mall shop (subtle visual time themes!) when Van Damme appears behind her and they engage in some creepy stranger role-playing, before revealing that they are husband and wife. They are being shadowed by some unseen thugs. The movie then cuts to the couple doing some candle-lit sensual fucking, filling Van Damme's "for de ladies" quotient which he insisted on for most of his films. The splits and ball-punching was for the guys, the shots of his ass were always "for de ladies".

In these early scenes between Sara and Van Damme, I began to have emotional stirrings prompted by my current love trials. As I watched the phone not ringing out of the corner of my eye, I became far more invested in Timecop's love story than hack-director Peter Hyams probably envisioned. Watching it again many years later, these scenes are rote and unintentionally funny. In 1994, they had me tied in knots.

With the un-ringing phone taunting me from the coffee table, I went into Mia Sara's death scene in a heightened state. The thugs that were shadowing the couple in the mall, end up following them back to their home and subduing Van Damme while blowing up his house with his wife in it. As Van Damme screamed in anguish as the flames consuming his love, I... fucking cried. I fucking cried. Jesus. Crying in Timecop is something that has stayed with me all these years, an anecdote I willingly offer up as evidence of my status as a pussy. It was a salty, tear-streaked watershed moment where I realized that my powers of empathy and sensitivity extended even to Jean Claude Van Damme action movies. In short, I was a pussy and I just had to embrace it, and once I did (with the help of Timecop) my high school years in a small town improved exponentially. I realized I was never going to fully fit into a hockey-obsessed community where squawking your tires on the main drag was a guys right of passage--so I didn't even try.

I blazed my own path in high school, abandoning the just-keep-my-head-down strategy of grade 9 and 10, for a full on peacock-ing that earned me friends and enemies in equal measure. I wore three-piece polyester thrift store suits to school and I refused to get my drivers license until I was nearly 19. When country dudes, with No Fear sweatshirts and tattoos of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil biting through a hockey stick, called me a "fag" it was like getting a compliment, I knew I was on the right track. I ended up leaving high school adjusted, laid and happy, instead of bitter, scarred and emotionally unprepared. Thanks Timecop!

Anyway, Van Damme's wife dies and then the movie flashes forward ten years later to 2004, where cars are covered in garish retro-future plastic panelling and drive themselves, and TV's are flat and cover most of the wall (at least they got some things right). Van Damme has become a Timecop for the TEC (Time Enforcement Commission) chasing time-manipulating bad guys through history. When he's not enforcing, er time, he's drinking himself to sleep in front of home movies of his wife, who he is still mourning intensely ten years later. His job puts his wife and her death at his fingertips. He could go back any time and prevent it from happening, but he knows that altering time in any way can have disastrous effects on the future. And so he suffers, and throws himself into his work, busting the criminals that are doing the very thing he has vowed not to do.

Time travel in the film is achieved by riding in a future-y looking sled, shot really fast along a track at some big geometrical statue thingy before disappearing in a crappy CGI ripple effect. It's pretty funny. The other concept that the film hammers home many times is that the same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time, so going back in time and giving yourself a high-five would result in a horrific, highly scientific death. Van Damme eventually runs afoul of Ron Silver, an oily, grasping politician. Silver is using time travel and his knowledge of economic history to make millions in order to, get this, fund his presidential campaign. That's it. He's not trying to engineer a new world order, he just needs cash to become president. Presumably all the usual sleazy avenues for presidential campaign funding have been closed down in 2004. Van Damme also learns that his wife's death in the past is the result of his investigation into Silver's dealings in the future. Well, his "investigation" really consists of a suspect telling him Silver is dirty and then Silver pretty much admitting to it. Armed with this knowledge, Van Damme breaks his strict no-fucking-with-time rule in order to save his wife and bring down the evil Silver.

Timecop is hilarious and preposterous and inept and another great slice of cheese from Van Damme. But on that winter's night in '94, Van Damme's anguished pining for love mirrored my own desire for closure with the girl that kept dragging me through an emotional obstacle course. The girl and I broke up proper a little while later and I ended up getting all the messy, immature relationship weirdness out of my system early in my teens, which was a blessing. The phone never did ring that night, but Timecop diverted and consoled and brought my feelings into focus. Because of that hilarious, bizarre viewing, I have never returned to Timecop until now. Watching it again, I've tried hard to recognize any of the moments or emotional cues that motivated me to cry or feel anything the way I did when I first watched it, but I can't. Now, it's just a fun, bad movie. If I could ride a time traveling sled through a portal back to 1994, I wouldn't shake my younger self and slap him across the face yelling, "your crying in a fucking Van Damme movie, snap out of it!". And not only because if I touched my younger self I would be breaking the same-matter-space rule and we would be converted into a pile of CGI goo like Ron Silver at the end of the movie. No, instead I would tell myself, "go on, get it out of your system, let the tears flow like Van Damme's mullet from the back of his head." Timecop helped me realize who I am --a man capable of crying during Timecop-- and I'm not ashamed of it. Some dudes become irreparably broken when relationships dissolve. The pressure to "stay tough" and lock their emotions away ends up backfiring and they become stalkers of ex-girlfriends or they open fire on a crowd with a machine gun. If only every guy could just watch Timecop, have a good cry and move on.