Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Ludicrous Sci-Fi Blockbuster Remains Surprisingly Fun

There was a brief period in the mid-’90s when Jean-Claude Van Damme looked set to join Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in the exclusive club of A-listers who could both open a movie and crush a human skull with their bare hands. Having scored a summer blockbuster hit with Dolph Lundgren team-up Universal Soldier, the Muscles from Brussels was chosen by John Woo for the bullet ballet master’s first Hollywood flick, Hard Target. Then he broke the $100 million barrier as a leading man in action cinema’s answer to Back to the Future.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Timecop stars Van Damme as Max Walker, an agent of the newly-formed Time Enforcement Commission, a department designed to prevent any pesky time travelers from meddling with the past. The film’s logic declares that as the future hasn’t happened yet, all time machine journeys, taken in what’s essentially a rocket-fueled go-kart, can only go one way.

Walker is such a man of principle that he doesn’t even attempt to go back and change the night a bunch of masked goons beat him to a pulp and burned his house down with his wife Melissa (Mia Sara) still inside. Well, not immediately, anyway. Instead, 10 years on from that fateful evening, the American with an unexplained Belgian accent spends most of his time trying to bring down the man overseeing the whole program.

Exploiting his senior position within the TEC, Senator Aaron McComb (Ron Silver) has been sending his lackeys back through time to gain illicit funds for his bid to become president. Walker’s one-time partner Lyle (Jason Schombing), for example, has been tasked with capitalizing on the infamous 1929 Wall Street crash, a mission that, when thwarted, ends with his surreal execution.

McComb isn’t averse to a spot of time-traveling himself. During a trip back to 1994, Walker and new partner Sarah Fielding (Gloria Reuben) discover two versions of the dastardly politician, the younger one about to hand over the computer chip company that will later balloon in value and his present-day counterpart who’ll stop at nothing to nix the deal. It’s here where Timecop starts to get entertainingly messy as its timelines blur and its major players duplicate. Yes, just like in 1991’s Double Impact, we get two Van Dammes for the price of one.

It’s not quantity over quality, either, as this is arguably the acting pinnacle of the action hero’s career. Sure, his performance was never going to win an Academy Award, but as Walker continues to struggle with Melissa’s tragic loss and has to cope with the shock of her alternate timeline revival, Van Damme proves his emotional range occasionally extends beyond Blue Steel.

JCVD also gets plenty of opportunities to show off his more familiar skills, whether it’s stopping the world’s most conspicuous shopping mall thief with a high kick or avoiding electrocution by doing the splits on his kitchen counter while sporting nothing but his pants. There’s also a scene that evokes silent movie icon Buster Keaton in how Walker quickly maneuvers himself between the wheels of an oncoming truck.

Sadly, the Belgian couldn’t land the script’s zingers as skillfully. Arnie, in particular, would be able to sell one-liners such as “Have an ice day” after freezing a henchman’s arm with nitrogen and then shattering it into millions of pieces, but Van Damme's monotonous delivery suggests he didn’t quite get the joke.

Comic timing certainly isn’t something Silver struggled with, as the Tony Award winner clearly had a blast playing a morally bankrupt figure determined to bulldoze his way to the top. Whether he’s picking existential fights with his staff (“Never interrupt me when I'm talking to myself”) or castigating his younger self (“Do yourself a favor: lay off the f***ing candy bars”), almost every line that comes out of McComb’s mouth is B-movie gold. It’s a scenery-chewing performance akin to Alan Rickman’s as Hans Gruber that’s perfectly in keeping with the ridiculousness of the plot.

Timecop does initially pose some interesting existential questions about the ethics of time travel, including the whole “Would you assassinate baby Hitler?” dilemma, but it descends further into pure sci-fi nonsense the more frequently the various timelines continue to collide. The same matter can’t accommodate the same space, according to its laws of physics, which is why, after Walker kicks one toward the other, the two McCombs merge into the same amorphous blob.

But that’s all part of the fun in a film that looked like it launched its star into the stratosphere, only to become his last commercial hurrah. Following a string of flops, Van Damme found himself having to share top billing with Dennis Rodman (Double Team) and Rob Schneider (Knock Off). By the time he teamed up with director Peter Hyams for a third occasion on 2009’s Universal Soldier: Regeneration, he’d spent a decade stuck in straight-to-DVD purgatory.

Perhaps Van Damme shouldn’t have been so stubborn about appearing in a sequel; the Belgian argued that its 1997 small-screen spin-off cheapened its legacy, explaining why Jason Scott Lee took over the mantle for 2003’s Timecop: The Berlin Decision. Still, the original remains a rare instance where an actor’s biggest film is also his best.