Timecop (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Apr 11, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Peter HyamsRelease Date(s)
1994 (April 29, 2025)Studio(s)
Universal Pictures (Scream Factory/Shout! Studios)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: F
Review
[Editor's Note: In the 5.1 track used for this release, the center channel dialogue leaks a bit into the left and right channels. Shout! Studios is currently looking into why this happened and we will update the review when we know more.]
While Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion have been somewhat superseded by general relativity and quantum mechanics, they still work well enough to describe everyday activities. That’s especially true of action cinema, where each of his three laws are demonstrated on a regular basis—for example, the action of a kick or a punch usually results in an opposite (though not necessarily equal!) reaction. Yet there’s a little-known fourth law of motion that applies specifically to action movies starring martial arts experts: as their careers progress, they usually go from making films emphasizing martial arts to making ones that focus on gunplay instead. (Given that this particular motion is at least partly the result of a lack of effort on their parts, that could also be considered the fourth law of thermodynamics: action hero laziness increases in direct proportion with entropy.)
This law of motion is clearly demonstrated by the career of Chuck Norris, who went from making martial arts focused films like Good Guys Wear Black and The Octagon to Cannon Films gun-fests like Invasion U.S.A. and The Delta Force. Steven Seagal would be another example, although in his case, the actual fight scenes in his later films are so bad that most fans probably wish that he would have just picked up a gun instead. Jean-Claude Van Damme’s career followed a similar arc, starting out with pure martial arts films like Bloodsport and Kickboxer. But by the early Nineties he was exhibiting the fourth law of motion by making films like Hard Target instead, where the quantity of gunplay far outweighed the hand-to-hand combat. Yet a funny thing happened on Van Damme’s way to becoming a pure gun star: he ran into Peter Hyams.
While Hyams had already established his bona fides as a director of action and suspense films, he wasn’t specifically associated with martial arts (although he would later go on to work with choreographer Xiong Xin Xin on his genre-bending The Musketeer in 2001). Yet he still did an admirable job of returning Van Damme to his roots with their first collaboration together, Timecop, and they would continue that trajectory with their next film Sudden Death. But it’s Timecop that really stands out in Van Damme’s career as a brief shining moment where the law of martial arts motion wasn’t just violated, it was completely reversed. Timecop was a good old-fashioned ass-kicking movie dressed in a shiny new science fiction veneer, and audiences clearly appreciated that fact, making it the highest grossing starring vehicle of Van Damme’s entire career (excluding films like Universal Soldier and Streetfighter where he wasn’t the sole draw).
Timecop is based on Mark Richardson and Mark Verheiden’s three-part comic book saga Time Cop: A Man out of Time, which originally ran in the Dark Horse Comics anthology in 1992. Verheiden wrote the screenplay for the film, which retains the central character of Max Walker but largely dumps the comic book storyline in favor of a completely new one. When time travel becomes a reality in 1994, the Justice Department creates the Time Enforcement Commission as a way of preventing anyone from traveling into the past and inadvertently changing the present. While Senator Aaron McComb (Ron Silver) provides congressional oversight, day-to-day operations of the TEC are handled by Commander Eugene Matuzak (Bruce McGill). Matuzak offers D.C. police officer Max Walker (Van Damme) a position at the agency, and Walker considers accepting it despite the fact that it might take away from time with his wife Melissa (Mia Sara). Yet a personal tragedy intervenes, and by 2004, Walker is one of the top agents at the TEC. When he’s sent back in time to stop a former agent from taking advantage of the stock market crash in 1929, he uncovers a larger plot that will change his life forever—along with the lives of nearly everyone else around him. Timecop also stars Gloria Rueben, Scott Bellis, Scott Lawrence, and Kenneth Welsh.
Since Timecop is indeed a time travel movie, the narrative is filled with all of the paradoxes and plot holes that you might expect. It’s pulp fiction after all, not hard sci-fi, so it has none of the thoughtfulness that has marked a few other time travel stories like The Final Countdown. It doesn’t waste any time introducing those paradoxes, either, since the Civil War heist scene that opens the film raises more questions than it answers (don’t think too hard about the comment regarding carbon-dating). Yet none of that really matters. What does matter is that Jean-Claude Van Damme kicks large quantities of ass in some reasonably well-staged fight sequences, and while he does pick up a gun at a few points, gunplay still generally takes a back seat to the high-kicking action. Van Damme even manages to perform his trademarked splits not once but twice, just in case you weren’t paying attention the first time.
Still, Timecop did miss at least one opportunity to explore the time travel concept on a deeper emotional level. The TEC exists because a person traveling into the past might do something that causes ripples in the timeline and changes the present, possibly for good in some ways, but inevitably for ill as well. That point is driven home by the fact that Max Walker clearly understands and accepts the fact that he can’t go back to prevent the tragedy that reshaped his own life. Yet he ends up being drawn back into that tragic event anyway in pursuit of the villain, which afforded the opportunity for a poignant The City on the Edge of Forever moment where Walker realizes that he must allow that past tragedy to proceed in order to protect the present. Instead, his actions end up changing the past and providing him with the path to a better future. To be fair, the nefarious activities of the villain had already altered the present very much for ill by that point, so one way or another, Walker had to do something in order to change it back. Yet the unambiguously happy ending of Timecop still deprives the story of having a bit more emotional resonance to it (although once again, this particular happy ending does raise more questions than it answers).
On the other hand, it’s just not that kind of film. No amount of analysis can change the fact that Timecop is a relatively straightforward ass-kicking movie in a fancy sci-fi dress, although some of those science fiction trappings are pretty interesting when considered on their own. Timecop was produced in 1994 but it’s primarily set in 2004, and while the speculative elements fell short in some ways (science fiction films always get the cars and display technologies wrong), it was alarmingly prescient in others. The activities (and intentions) of the villain bear some shockingly accurate parallels to events in our own present day, and some of the dialogue sounds eerily familiar. Intentionally or not, Hyams and Verheiden “read the room” correctly in terms of the cultural trends that were building toward our current moment.
Those are still just background elements, though. Timecop never loses sight of the fact that it’s all about letting Jean-Claude Van Damme kick ass while showing off his own butt repeatedly, preferably while doing the splits. Clearly, that’s exactly what fans wanted to see, which is why Timecop was a box office hit in 1994 and that’s also why it’s been a fan favorite ever since then. It’s proof positive that sometimes, just sometimes, giving the people what they want is an unambiguously good thing.
As usual, Peter Hyams served as his own cinematographer on Timecop, shooting it on 35mm film using Panavision Panaflex cameras with Panavision E-series anamorphic lenses. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, graded for High Dynamic Range in Dolby Vision and HDR10, but there’s no other information available about the master that Universal provided. Yet one thing’s perfectly clear: it’s a huge improvement over the previous Blu-ray. Hyams has always favored natural lighting and practical light sources, and he’s anything but afraid of the dark. That has caused issues with many older Blu-ray transfers of his films, but in this case, the HDR grade has been used to pull detail out of the shadows that wasn’t visible before, but while still allowing those shadows to be appropriately shadowy. The highlights are now brighter and the blacks are deeper, all of which helps to accentuate those details. It’s not perfectly accurate to the look of a print back in 1994, since fourth-generation film elements didn’t have that kind of dynamic range, but think of it as being an enhanced version that retains the same basic character that Hyams intended.
Timecop was produced early in the digital effects era, and the visual effects in the film combined traditional optical printer work with digital compositing for shots that involved digital effects. Live action plates were scanned in at 2K on a TC4 film scanner, the effects were generated and composited in digitally, and then the results were scanned back out to film. That means that all of the effects work displays noticeable image degradation compared to the unadulterated live action footage, but that’s simply the nature of how the film was originally produced. VFX shots aside, the rest of the film looks sharper and clearer than it ever has before, with nicely refined textures and beautifully resolved grain. That grain does get a little heavier in some of the darker shots where Hyams was pushing the exposure, but it’s extremely fine for the majority of the film, and the robust encoding means that there aren’t any issues with compression artifacts. It’s a gorgeous upgrade.
Audio is offered in English 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. Like many titles that Universal distributed during that era, Timecop was released theatrically with a DTS 5.1 mix, with a matrix-encoded 2.0 Dolby Stereo mix for theatres that hadn’t converted to digital yet. And like most of those early DTS mixes, it’s an aggressive one, although not quite as much so as Hard Target, where the mix was as over-the-top as the film itself. The opening Largo Entertainment logo is as thunderous as ever, and the rain during the opening heist scene still falls as hard as a hard rain’s a-gonna fall. The gunfire, explosions, and time travel whooshes all have plenty of punch and heft. That said, there are a few complaints online that the track seems somewhat constrained relative to the Blu-ray, but I no longer have that disc in order to do a direct comparison. It’s unlikely that most viewers will notice much of a difference between the two, but it’s still something to be aware of, so caveat emptor. In any event, the 2.0 track is still available as well, and the Dolby Surround and/or DTS:X upmixers can still do wonders with it.
Shout! Factory’s Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of Timecop is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. It also includes a slipcover that duplicates the theatrical poster artwork on the insert. (The slipcover will only be available with the first pressing, hence the Limited Edition designation.) Unfortunately, it includes exactly zero extras of any kind. Zip. Nada. Bupkis. Diddly-squat. Not even a trailer. Mind you, that means that all of the extras from the Blu-ray have been ported over, but that’s only because it was equally bare bones. Universal’s original DVD did include a trailer, but that hasn’t been carried forward ever since. So, if you’re interested in the making of Timecop, you’ll have to look elsewhere. (Cinefantastique did cover the film in their October 1994 issue, but even they only devoted two pages to it.)
The good news is that the outstanding 4K presentation of Timecop blows the Blu-ray version out of the water. So, this is still well worth picking up for Jean-Claude Van Damme fans, Peter Hyams fans, and fans of Nineties action filmmaking in general. (And if you’re a fan of Van Damme’s butt, so much the better.)
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).