My guilty pleasure: Timecop
There's a scene in the 2012 time-travel thriller Looper, already over-referenced, in which the hero (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), sitting in a cafe with an older version of himself (Bruce Willis), asks how time travel works. Willis sighs: "I don't want to talk about time travel because … then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws."
I rather wish they'd done the diagrams-with-straws scene. But I'm a sucker for a good old nerdy time-travel yarn. Then again, who isn't? Studios have clearly realised this over the years, because there are an awful lot of them.
Our hero in Timecop is poor old Jean-Claude van Damme at the high-water mark of his career, when some studio execs thought he might be going somewhere. When all's said and done Timecop is basically "a low-rent Terminator", as one critic put it. ("Van Damme is compelling only when he takes his clothes off," was another's verdict. Which he does, a lot.) And, yes, this was clearly focus-grouped from the start by people looking for the next Schwarzenegger. Pumped-up European star with funny accent who can't really act? Check; time travel? Yup? Lots and lots of gratuitous violence? You got it. There's also a rather sad, lowish-budget feel about the whole thing. The time machine is basically a rocket-powered Go-kart. Everybody involved, from the director down, is clearly phoning it in. Except Van Damme. I think there's something oddly poignant about his performance, especially when we know where his career went afterwards.
We open in 1994 (the year of the film's release). Time travel has just been invented. Max Walker (everyone should have their name appropriated for a Hollywood blockbuster hero), is drafted into a top-secret US government agency with the job of going back in time to catch baddies who are trying to change history to their own advantage. As one wonk explains at the beginning: "You can't go into the future because it hasn't happened yet. But you can go back … it's like throwing a stone in a lake and there are ripples, except they are ripples in time." (You sense the makers are rather pleased with the sophistication of what they're serving up.)
Anyway, we dwell in 1994 long enough to see see Walker's wife murdered before jumping forward to 2004 to find him a grizzled, morose time cop still obsessing over old videos of his late wife (at this point, incidentally, we have voice-controlled driverless cars - nice prediction, guys). A corrupt senator, played by the late, great Ron Silver - in a scenery-chewing turn that is by far the best thing about the film - is trying to become the next president by changing history. The senator decides to go back in time to kill Walker before Walker can go back in time to stop the senator changing history (and possibly, as a bonus, save his wife) ... you get the picture.
I really love Van Damme here, and I especially love the way nobody tries to explain why a burnt-out cop has a Belgian accent and some seriously crazy, kick-ass martial arts moves. He makes a pretty good fist of playing two versions of himself 10 years apart, delivering a performance that is rather charming. Why the scene in which he beats off a couple of taser-wielding baddies in his underpants hasn't gone down in cinema history is beyond me.
But Timecop has another special resonance for me. Time travel films are poignant because they fulfil that ultimate fantasy: to go back and do things differently second time around. After I saw the film in 1994, I wrote an open letter, published in another newspaper, to the 2004 version of Max Walker. Now I find myself in the strangely poignant position of being able to read that letter 10 years further down the line, in 2014.
And, yeah, I'd really like to knock some sense into that kid in 1994. But, as they tend to say in time-travel films, that sort of thing just ends in trouble.