Episode 4: Timecop and Bottom 5 Time Travels

Timecop –

• 1994
• Directed by one of my favorite, under-the-radar directors, Peter Hyams. He’s made a few great films in my estimation (2010, Outland, Running Scared) and quite a few interesting ones (Narrow Margin, The Relic, End of Days) and then he made a few others that, well, were pretty bad (A Sound of Thunder, which is also a time travel movie and Sudden Death, which also stars the muscles from Brussels, Mr. Jean Claude Van Damme.)
• What’s so cool about him is that since about 1984, he shot all of his own movies and as cinematographer, he has SUCH a distinctive look!
• This thing has so much talent behind the scenes. I mean, it reads like a who’s who of people I loved when I was a kid. Produced by the head of Dark Horse comics Mike Richardson and The Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi and his longtime producing partner Rob Tapert. Written by Mark Verheiden, who did an unbelievable job penning comic book continuations of the Aliens series after Cameron’s movie came out.
• An onscreen, we’ve got Mia Sara, who played Sloane in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Lili in Ridley Scott’s Legend;
• Bruce McGill who played Jack Dalton on McGyver and who gave one of the best speeches in cinema history in The Insider;  
• Gloria Rueben who is probably best known as the HIV+ physician assistant on ER or for her turn as Krista on Mr. Robot.
• And, Hell, we even have Ron Silver, who for me has always been a b-level version of Al Pacino, but who I know got some big notice in The West Wing playing campaign shark Bruno Gianelli.
• But, alas, Timecop rests all the heavy lifting on… Jean Claude Van Damme. And while his hair throughout is spectacular – seriously, I’ve rarely seen an actor’s hair this perfect with the possible exception of Dougrey Scott in Mission Impossible 2 – he and his accent just bury this thing completely.
• And what’s funny is, he gets what he needs to do, you can see how close he comes, but so often he just misses the mark. And the way the filmmakers try to work in his physicality is just so awkward.
• This movie didn’t need a great athlete that can do split high kicks that make audiences groan vicariously. It needed a dude who could play an everyday kind of cop.
• I cheered for Van Damme, but by the end you really do wish this was played by someone that’s more the caliber of actor as all of the supporting players.
• Alas, everything that’s wrong with this movie doesn’t lie at the feet of Van Damme. Just a lot of it.
• The story is twisty, and it deals with huge ideas in a really small way, likely due to budget limitations.
• It’s got Van Damme as a DC cop named Walker who is in capital L Love with Mia Sara’s Melissa.
• After a surprisingly gratuitous love scene, Walker and Melissa are attacked in their home by some thugs.
• Walker is shot and left for dead and apparently Melissa is killed when their home explodes.
• Fast forward about a decade later and Walker works as an enforcer for the Time Enforcement Commission to protect the past from tampering.
• The Commission is overseen by Senator Aaron McComb, who is portrayed as so slimy by Silver that no one is surprised when it’s revealed he’s the one actually trying to alter the past to ensure he wins the presidency.
  • I think it’s important to stop here and give Timecop a nice pat on the back for its frighteningly accurate look into the US’s political future. McComb utters a few bon mots, but these resonate after 2016:
    • When I’m in office it’s going to be just like the 80’s. The top 10% will get richer and the other 90% can emigrate to Mexico where they can get a better life.
    • Elections are won with television. You don’t need the press, you don’t need endorsements, you don’t even need the truth. You need money.
    • Country’s down the drain because of the special interests. We need somebody in the White House so rich he doesn’t have to listen to anybody.
• Anyway, the Senator’s a slimeball and it’s revealed he’s responsible for the death of Melissa which leads to a crazy two Van Damme for one climax (take THAT Double Impact) back at the exploding house from the beginning.
• Oh yeah, somewhere in the middle there is Gloria Rueben’s character hilariously riding shot-gun with Walker during a time-jump that ends up with them dumped into a pond.
• (After which the unnecessarily bra-less Rueben clearly indicates the water was cold and Van Damme actually breaks eye contact during a take).
• The time travel tech here is so… dumb. It’s like one of those bad looking Star Trek shuttlecrafts with a big jet engine in the back that, super mysteriously and completely illogically, DISAPPEARS when you pop into the past, but then re-appears when you come back to the present.
• And the dude that’s running it! Not Bruce McGill, who’s like the TimeCop police chief – all stereotypically blustery and angry – but the dude who presses the buttons to launch people into the past? FOR NO REASON after an office scene between Van Damme and McGill, we cut to a full-body shot of a thoroughly naked woman reclining on a bed who then rises to seduce the camera. Then we cut to the CONTROL ROOM of TimeCop central and there’s this long-haired doofus wearing VR gear that gets slapped by McGill after which Van Damme murders the line “Looks like safe sex to me.”
• Moments like this make it hard for me to believe TimeCop isn’t actually a movie from a decade earlier as I feel we’d mostly evolved past this level of shenaniganry as of the mid-90’s, although considering the boom of the erotic thriller around that time, maybe this is right at home?
• The movie has some good shots and overall it looks fantastic as Hyams trademark as a cinematographer is to shot in very low light. There’s a terrific moment early on when Mia Sara in in a dark room and lights a candle and Van Damme is standing in the doorway, silhouetted. It genuinely feels intimate and the smartness of the short is that it focuses on the better actor in the scene while hiding the weaker one.
• This was at the advent of CG, and this was not a big budget picture, so many of the effect’s are dated. That said, there are a few nice ones including an awesome shot of Ron Silver speaking with his past self. Rather than just doing a split screen, Hyams blocks the scene to show Silver actually cross behind and then in front of himself. It’s a great bit that really shows off Hyams’s skill as a director while also giving Silver the deliciously fun line “Never interrupt me when I’m talking to myself.”
• Alas, the CG doesn’t fair quite as well at the end when one character comes into contact with his past self and basically turns into a puddle of that glitter slime you can buy at 5 Below.
• While I’m not sure I’d recommend TimeCop, I have to say I did mostly enjoy it. The solid supporting cast, good cinematography, and a snappy, quick moving screenplay with nice plot twists, including a pointless but cool one involving Gloria Rueben’s character, all make for a fun way to blow 90 minutes without feeling too bad about the time spent.

Bottom 5 Time Travels

Superman: The Movie

• 1978
• Directed by Richard Donner
• Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and one seriously over-paid Marlon Brando who, I shit you not, proposed the ideas to producer Ilya Salkind that Jor-El not be a human, but instead be a green bagel or a suitcase voiced by Brando.
• Written by a coalition, but most notably the story Mario Puzo, scribe for The Godfather and an Oscar winner for Godfather 2 and Robert Benton, who won Oscars for writing and directing Kramer Vs. Kramer. How the mighty have fallen!
• Puzo was hired to write the movie for $600,000 in 1978 money, which means he basically got paid an Elon Musk level fortune to write the stupidest time travel solution of all time.
• The movie is largely charming due to Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder who do a wonderful job bringing Superman and Lois Lane to life.
• Donner’s light touch in the director’s chair proves memorable. He keeps things moving and stays true to the much-loved characters from the comic books, succeeding in particular with young Clark Kent’s upbringing in Smallville and his move to Metropolis where he becomes a reporter of some kind.
• Where Donner, and especially the screenwriters fail is in the writing of the third act. While Gene Hackman proves to be a fantastic Lex Luthor, the entire “nuke the San Andreas Faultline and drop California into chaos” storyline goes so far off the rails that it ruins what would otherwise be a fantastic movie.
• While Brando’s white weave was a stretch of credibility, it pales to the Superman-flying super-fast around the world and getting it to spin backward so that somehow time reverses itself so he can swoop down to save Lois from being swallowed in an Earthquake chasm.
• Not only does the Earth’s rotation have zero to do with time, the idea that Sups would do all this to essentially save a single woman is a real testament to not thinking things through. Forget the reality of what kind of havoc just spinning the world around the other way would have for the other 5 BILLION people on the planet, we need to save Lois!
• Can you imagine you’re a Florida man who just finished wrasslin’ gators to save your baby mama from a drunken Everglades escapade, only to have to do it AGAIN because some reporter’s car fell into a ditch 3000 miles away? What if you won the lottery in New York City at the same time Lois was perishing? Would you win again? Thoughtless, Sups.

The Final Countdown

• 1980
• Starring some high powered talent  – Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Charles Durning. Some may recall James Farentino and Katherine Ross in the usual crow-barred in romance, but at least here that subplot helps put a bow on the proceedings.
• Directed by Don Taylor, who took another time-travel foray with 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Here, dealing with people, he’s decidedly less effective a storyteller as we travel in time to… do nothing. Sadly it was also Taylor’s last film, which is a sad note to end on, honestly.
• The story of The Final Countdown is high concept: Take a modern-day, fully-loaded aircraft carrier (USS Nimitz) and send it through a portal in the Pacific Ocean that transports it to the day of the attack of on Pearl Harbor. Kind of convenient timing, but ok.
• And then… well, it takes them a while to re-orient after the super cool special effects of the BLUE HOLE they travel through. I know it sounds porny, but it’s actually more like something you would see at a Whitesnake concert that probably looks super cool with a headful of acid. Bands of smoke and light with long shadows. Nifty.
• I have to admit, I was completely in love with this movie when I saw it at AGE 5 because my favorite movie at the time was 1978’s The Black Hole. I caught this at a drive-in and ran to my mother, yelling “It’s just like The Black Hole, only there’s a BLUE HOLE.” I was five. And it’s still the best part of the movie.
• Anyhow, once the Nimitz picks up some castaways, Captain Kirk Douglas and Castaway Charles Durning (who was to be Roosevelt’s running mate, but who vanished shortly before Pearl Harbor) debate the merits of blasting the Japanese with their superior tech. Meanwhile Farentino and Ross fall in love and Sheen takes a liking to Ross’s dog.
• Just as they decide to change the course of history and destroy the attacking Japanese fleet, the BLUE HOLE arrives, yells “FOOOOOLLLLLED YOU” and then shuttles them back to the present with nothing to show for what happened.
• So, a time travel movie where the only thing that happened is a Navy pilot gets left behind after falling in love with a random castaway. Forget all that military and war stuff… THIS IS A LOVE STORY. Sigh.

My Science Project

• 1985
• Stars John Stockwell, Danielle Von Zernick, a hilarious Fisher Stevens, a completely bonkers Dennis Hopper doing thorough self-parody at this point and Richard Masur in a small role as a sheriff that bears mentioning because he’s Richard Masur.
• Directed by Jonathan R. Betuel for Disney’s fairly new-at-the-time Touchstone pictures. Betuel is best known as the writer of The Last Starfighter and, later, as the founder of the special effects house LUMA PICTURES. Betuel is not best known for his second feature, the Woopie Goldberg-starring dino adventure called Theordore Rex which I’m sure he, and anyone who was unfortunate enough to see it, has tried to forget.
• Released the same year as Back to the Future, Weird Science and Real Genius, My Science Project somehow wasn’t as successful. This was probably due to the fact it lacks character, charm, warmth and any real storyline. It does have some totally kick-ass special effects, though!
• Hilariously was released in Sweden as TimeBusters because it was seen as a mash-up of Ghostbusters and Back to the Future.
• The story, if you could call it that, concerns a greasemonkey high school kid (Stockwell, who is just as boring as he was in Christine) that loves cars more than anything else in the world. He has to figure out something for a science project before his teacher (Hopper) fails him, so he and his best bro (Stevens) break into a military junk yard and obtain some kind of extraterrestrial, animated-electricity-sucking machine.
• This thing looks like one of those Tesla plasma globes smashed into the center of an 80’s boom box. In other words, totally sweet.
• Anyhow, they turn the thing in and Hopper decides to plug it in which creates a rip in time-space. The unique idea here is that rather than the lead characters travelling through time, they are surrounded by period set-pieces like a gladiator battle, a Vietnam firefight and a rampaging T-Rex. Time travels to THEM.
• It’s all pointless and results in the time-space rift becoming increasingly dangerous as it consumes more power, which results in Stockwell, Fisher and Stockwell’s nerdy new girlfriend literally RACING, in a muscle car, ELECTRICITY that traveling through power lines.
• These are some truly bonkers time shenanigans, and while I’m a fan of the movie – it’s such dumb, good fun – I cannot recommend it to anyone who has any shame or, you know, likes to THINK while watching a movie.

The Exotic Time Machine

• 1998
• (Now apparently recut as part of an excruciatingly bad mash-up with similar titles called T&A Time Travelers!)
• Directed by Felicia Sinclair, which I’m about 75% sure is a pseudonym for uber-indie-producer/director/writer/toy lover Charles Band as this was a production from Band’s Surrender Cinema label. Either that or its Rolfe Kanefsky, a guy who did A LOT of this kind of material around the time this was produced and who often worked with lead actress Gabriella Hall. Either way, I don’t believe Felicia Sinclair is a real person. The name sounds like it was stolen off a poster for Burlesque night at the local dinner theater.
• Sure enough, yeah, this is a softcore flick something that, were you lucky enough to grow up in the 90’s, you’d find late night on Skinemax, I mean Cinemax. A truly bygone era, this choice is a bit of time travel itself as we shrug off the shackles of present-day and return to the halcyon days when 3am on any almost any pay cable channel would gift you with well-lit, gorgeous bodies writhing in undreamt of ecstasies.
• We’re not here for plot, but if you insist on such things, The Exotic Time Machine – not to be confused with the vastly inferior “Erotic Time Machine” from New Jersey’s Seduction Cinema – finds Leon, a scientist – or something – and his helpful assistant Daria working on a time machine. Leon accidentally is sent to the past and ends up in 1700s France where he, of course, bangs Marie Antoinette.
• Meanwhile Daria attempts to find Leon in the past, but goes back too far, to the time of Sheherazade and the Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. She, of course, watches Sheherazade and Aladdin bang before picking up her kit and, inexplicably, heading to gangster-era Chicago where we see Al Capone bang his mistress.
• Letterboxd user AlitaMcFly commented that the movies used sex scenes the same way musicals use songs and that’s about as apt an observation one could make, not only about this movie, but this entire genre as a whole. In musicals, the action and plot stop to allow for a musical interlude. In softcore, everything comes (pun intended) to an abrupt halt se we can watch people screw.
• And screw they do! But oddly, there are consequences when the modern day is converted into an authoritarian bargain bin Nazi nightmare because Leon returns home with Mimi, Marie Antoinette’s handmaiden, and she’s knocked up with his child – WHICH SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO GIVE BIRTH TO SO WE CAN AVOID TWO MORE WORLD WARS! Plot Twist!
• It’s a big damn goof of a movie with high school play sets but some straight up gorgeous naked folks all getting busy, not the least of which is the amazingly beautiful Gabriella Hall. Lets just say, to no surprise for you, Mike, that I’m quite the aficionado of this genre.

The Tomorrow War

• 2021
• Directed by Chris McKay, (Lego Batman 1 and 2) who I think works better with Legos than he does with human actors, considering this was his live-action directorial debut, although to be honest, the problems here are not with the direction, although IT DID COST OVER $200 MILLION TO MAKE.
• The real culprit here is Zach Dean, who wrote this mess.
• It’s about a high science teacher named Dan played by Chris Pratt, who strives for something bigger in life and gets his chance when soldiers fighting a future war against deadly aliens arrive back in time and basically draft Joe-shmoes like him to be cannon fodder because the human race is down to about ½ million people left.
• There’s all sorts of rules to the time travel – all sorts of shenanigans involving how they can only travel to the point where the time travel was invented and only so far back, yadda yadda yadda.
• It’s basically an excuse for a lot of action and high stakes battles that generally are pretty exciting, but for a few things:
• 1.) they’re using everyday people (via a lottery and who were going to die anyhow) as chum to hold off the alien baddies. Which is just a super awful concept. Like, we invented time travel and the best we can do with it is pull people from the past and use them as expendable soldiers? So vile! It’s just so gross a reason!
• 2.) I mean, we’re clearly not in butterfly effect territory here because we’re taking literally hundreds of thousands of people out of time and then thrusting them into the future to die. Like, doesn’t that have an effect on things?
• 3.) Oh, so they use these people who are going to die, but what happens when they don’t die the way they were supposed to? Doesn’t it present some major time paradoxes? They try to explain it away with Pratt and his daughter by saying she believed he deserted her and their family, trauma which turns her into this combination soldier/scientist badass working on a serum to destroy the aliens.
• Played by Yvonne Strahovski, who I kept thinking was Brie Larson for the entire movie, the character of the daughter is like a STEM-is-for-girls-too archetype that I quite liked, but they hobble her with daddy issues.
• Also, the everyman American hero thing is sooooo played out. It’s a conservative dream to have the fate of the world lie at the feet of an armed-to-the-teeth chump with more beer gut than a clue, but here’s Tomorrow War positing that these at-risk blood pressure patients are somehow a future dream-team fighting force that will reset the timeline with their grit and perseverance. Just no.
• By the end of this thing, SPOILERS, Pratt somehow brings back the serum from the future and solves all the problems, thus eradicating the timeline which would then… get rid of the damn serum because nothing ever happened in the future. And yet it did? Look, I’m fine with riding along with shoddy logic for a good bit of time travel, but in a movie that so tried to cover its tracks, this felt like an insanely glaring error.

Staff Pick – Die Hard 2

• 1990
• Directed by Renny Harlin, who would have a wacky, wild career that includes some highs like Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight and some serious lows like Driven and Exorcist: The Beginning. I love Harlin for Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which I think is the best of the non-Nancy Freddy movies and also Deep Blue Sea which will forever have one of the greatest cinematic surprises I have ever seen.
• Die Hard 2, for those who somehow don’t know, finds everyone’s favorite wrong-place, wrong-time off-duty cop John McClane battling terrorists again, but this time in a busy airport on Christmas Eve.
• Lots to love here, honestly. The script by Steven DeSouza REALLY goes for broke, always amping up the action and, in William Sadler’s icy, steely and scary Col Stuart, gives us perhaps an even badder bad guy than Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber. When Stuart crashes a planeload of passengers to teach the Dulles tower crew not to cross him, he instantly reached the very top of the villain list.
• It’s also important to note how well this movie holds continuity with the original Die Hard! Bonnie Bedelia reprises her role as McClane’s wife, the sassy, smart Holly Gennero and we even get a quick cameo from a Twinkie-choming Reginald VelJohnson as Sgt. Powell, the beat cop who cheered John on while in Nakatomi Plaza.
• But the best returning character – and a complete missed opportunity for both of us on our asshole lists – is none other than Dick Thornburg played by the great William Atherton with every ounce of pomposity he can muster. This actor, man. Is there anyone in cinema that played unlikable dickheads better? This is the same dude who played Walter Peck in Ghostbusters and Jerry Hathaway in Real Genius! He’s so good here and the continued antagonism with Bedelia’s Holly is super entertaining, leading to a great payoff.
• I’m pretty sure I read this script before I saw the movie – back in the day I used to buy screenplays at a shop in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA – and the story as I recall was even more batshit than what ended up on screen. I remember a part where John was supposed to swing from a helicopter while chasing guys on snowmobiles and he was like weaving around power lines or something. It was a wild read.
• Anyhow, if you’re looking for an oldie but still a goodie that packs a solid punch, why not Die Hard 2? Die Hard always gets all the talk each Christmas time, but this one too was set at Christmas, so isn’t it too technically a Christmas movie? (I’m pretty sure the last line in the movie is “Merry christmas.”

Mike’s Movie – Knock Knock

• As we celebrate, or perhaps damn, Keanu Reeves for reprising arguably his most-beloved role as Neo in the Matrix series, I think it’s important to bring up the subject of Reeves skill as an actor.
• It’s been long-debated that he’s either the worst leading man, or just an irreverent original who follows the beat of his own drum.
• And certainly with those Matrix movies, the John Wick films, The Bill and Teds and even his lesser known turns in flicks like The River’s Edge or Parenthood, he’s been a bit of a critical and audience darling.
• That said, for every My Own Private Idaho, there are probably two or three… or four like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a movie in which Reeves is so miscast that it’s actually difficult to watch him as he’s pummeled by the enormous talents of the inimitable Gary Oldman.
• Sometimes Reeves is only slightly out of his element, forgiveably so, like in Speed or Constantine or my much-beloved The Replacements.
• Alas sometimes, he’s so bad, so cringe as the kids might say, that the movie itself crumbles all around his wretched performance.
• With that, Mike, I’m offering you this gift: 2015’s Knock Knock.
• Directed by, Eli you either love me or hate me Roth (for the record, I’m no fan), this one surely will be a patience tester as I’ve seen it myself and can attest.