Screen Quarantine Review: Timecop

Walter Rhein
5 min readApr 22, 2020

How did this not win ‘Best Picture’ in 1994?

Still from ‘Timecop’ 37:19

Yeah, it’s the movie that JCVD gets into a situation that only doing the splits will save him. Actually, that’s every JCVD movie. Fortunately, JCVD is history’s best on-screen doer of the splits. He’s the splits GOAT, he’s in the HOF!

“How can you get into a situation where doing the splits can save your life?” you might wonder. Glad you asked!

The ever flexible and mostly incomprehensible Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a Timecop named Walker. (Maybe instead of Timecop they should have gone with Timeranger?) Anyway, he’s enjoying a nap on his couch when he’s attacked by two typical 80’s henchmen, although one of them isn’t Al Leong (they must have ran out of money getting Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend to star in the film…also Timecop is from the 90s). One of the henchman has some sort of stupid electric gun and he snarls something incomprehensible about “50,000 Volts.” Well, during the fight, Walker knocks over a jug of water and then he’s laying on the ground and he sees the water is spreading out to cover the henchman’s feet.

“Ah-ha!” you’re thinking. “He’ll just spring up from the floor into a perfect sitting splits suspended on his counter top EXACTLY when the henchman shoots at him, and the electricity will travel through the water and kill the henchman.”

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Walter Rhein

Certified English and physics teacher. Editor, journalist, illustrator and novelist. https://walterrhein.substack.com/