Subject: REVIEW: TIMECOP

From: [email-masked] (W. Yacco)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 03:30:02 GMT

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				TIMECOP
		       A film review by W. Yacco
			Copyright 1994 W. Yacco

     Aside from serving principally as a means of connecting between
the fight-scene dots, the TIMECOP plot does nothing but suffer in it's
exposition.  You do come to understand that there's a conspiracy, and
if you're quick, or are already familiar with sci-fi time-travel
plotting, you'll probably pick up on the seemingly unmotivated early
action involving unexplained characters.  No, the problem isn't that
the movement loses the viewer so much as that it never captivates the
viewer or generates any real involvement with either the characters or
the story.

     Can you care about the quest to save a wife you've barely met, and
whose relationship to the hero is barley developed?  It's not likely
under the best circumstances, but the story isn't about such a quest
until the very end.  In fact, only two characters have more than a
single dimension: Van Damme's hero and Ron Silver's arch-villain.  Yet
other than a few sneers, even their interaction starts late in the
film.  What TIMECOP needs is a something at the outset that the
audience can look forward to throughout the film.  But there's
nothing: no mystery, no conflict, no holy grail, nothing but one
almost incidental battle after another.

     If there had only been something to care about, you might even be
willing to suspend your disbelief enough to accept the preposterously
amateur boxes-on-wheels that are supposed to pass for vehicles of the
future.  For that matter, you might also overlook some of the staging.
For example, the time-travel concept, lifted whole cloth from BACK TO
THE FUTURE, has time travelers being propelled into whenever on a
rocket sled.  What makes it particularly ludicrous is that the tracks
are deliberately built up to a wall in an effort to force a sense of
jeopardy.  At least in BACK TO THE FUTURE, when the car ran out of
road, it didn't seem to have been planned in advance.

     Still, TIMECOP is better than a lot of films in either of the
genres it mixes.  It doesn't really go anywhere, but at least it isn't
terribly tedious while it doesn't go there.  And even if Van Damme
can't rival Steven Segal in UNDER SIEGE (okay, so Segal can't rival
Segal in UNDER SIEGE either.  Sue me.), at least he isn't completely
wooden.  And Ron Silver reeks some of his usual evil as well.

     On my one-to-four lizard scale, TIMECOP rates a one and a half.

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+        W.  Yacco [email-masked] CIS: 72662,1255 MCI:
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