Oct 2

Oct 2 Classic Movie Review : Timecop (1994)

Almost nobody remembers this now, but the UFC murdered the martial arts movie business in cold blood. Before you could prove you were tough by stepping in a chain-link cage, toughness was a vibe. Something you could project by wearing gray sweatpants and roundhouse-kicking the air while explaining Eastern philosophy you only half-understood.

Guys didn’t watch Jean-Claude Van Damme movies because they were good. They watched them the way you watch an instructional VHS: to steal a spin kick or to motivate yourself to hit the gym . Which is why a movie like Timecop exists. Not because cinema needed it, but because 1994 needed it.

In case you’ve been cursed with thirty years of not knowing what Timecop was about, the answer is right there in the title. It’s about a cop who polices time. That’s it. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Max Walker, a guy recruited into the shadowy Time Enforcement Commission, which is basically the DMV owned by supervillains. Before he can even say yes, his wife (Mia Sara) is murdered in a way that’s equal parts mysterious and convenient, which only makes him more determined to become… well, you get it. A time cop.

A Certain Type of Dude

Nobody in their right mind ever watched Timecop because it was a good movie. They watched it because it scratched a very specific itch for a very specific kind of guy. The kind of guy who quietly believed he was destined for something apocalyptic, and that “destiny” was probably tied to some vague revenge fantasy he couldn’t articulate. Revenge against who? The government, his boss, maybe the entire concept of Monday mornings. Didn’t matter.

What mattered was watching Jean-Claude Van Damme throw himself into a suicide mission with the casual confidence of a man who’d just lost his wife and therefore had nothing left to lose. That romance, the dead-wife-as-superpower romance, was catnip for guys like this, and Van Damme embodied it better than anyone. He would walk from frame to frame to wreck shit up and sometimes overcomplicated things for the sake of it just so that he would look cool doing it.

There’s a famous scene where Walker is fighting one time villain while dodging another’s super-taser (clearly written by someone whose knowledge of electricity maxed out in eighth grade science). Instead of just stepping out of range like a normal person (and he had time to), he hoists himself into the splits on the kitchen counter, balanced above a puddle of water like a human "do not try this at home" sign. The stunt is funny, but what’s funnier is the logic: he didn’t need to do it.

He just wanted to prove he could. In that moment, actor and character collapsed into one identity: Van Damme, the man who never saw a problem so simple he couldn’t overcomplicate it in order to look impossibly cool and Walker were the same person. That kind of earnest masculinity (half-gymnastics, half-revenge fantasy) doesn’t really exist anymore. We’ve analyzed it, mocked it, and ironized it out of existence. But watching it now, there’s something almost quaint about how unselfconscious it was.

Trauma and Time Management

The fallacy that trauma can be mined forever as motivation actually gets weirdly challenged in Timecop. Walker’s whole loop-de-loop mission is to save his wife by stopping her murder before it happens. Which, if you think about it, completely undermines his job description. He’s literally supposed to enforce time manipulation laws, not exploit them for personal gain. But that’s the thing—trauma is such a narrative superfood in ’90s action movies that it doesn’t need to make sense.

It just needs to justify the hero breaking all the rules. The only reason the movie even halfway sells it is because the head of the Time Enforcement Commission ( a gleefully sleazy Ron Silver) turns out to be a time-gerrymandering scumbag, and once you’re facing a villain like that, the line between "cop" and “cosmic vigilante" doesn’t really matter. So, the inciting incident is revisited where present Max and past Max team up to fight off the bad guy and it’s both great and batshit insane.

In the end, Walker’s present self has to die so his past self can live happily ever after (and, if memory serves, maybe even become president?). But the whole thing collapses if you think about it for more than ten seconds. If future Walker can swoop in and save the day, why didn’t it happen already? Why did poor Melissa have to be murdered in the first place?And what’s with the two McCombs fusing into a glowing CGI meatball at the end? None of it matters. Because the fantasy has been fulfilled.

The timeline has been bent, broken, and duct-taped back together so that Jean-Claude Van Damme can SAVE THE GIRL. Everything else, physics, logic, causality, all bent to the sheer power of his back muscles and will.

I love that movies like Timecop existed. Movies that were all vibe and zero logic, unless you count "the logic of these hands." They were cinematic Band-Aids for a very particular kind of male insecurity, one that doesn’t really exist anymore because the image of the physically dominant man has been so thoroughly settled. By 1994, the UFC was technically alive but still a rumor, and every spin-kicking gym rat still believed he "had a chance." That window has closed forever.

And it’s one of those weird cases of negative progress you can’t pin on the woke, no matter how hard you try. Bring back the ponytailed guys in American flag pants. We need them more than ever.