Post by ronnierocketago on Jul 19, 2008 17:53:53 GMT
TIMECOP (1994) - ***
"Never interrupt me when I'm talking to myself."
With the death of actor/conservative pundit Ron Silver the other day, I was quite frankly surprised to find several thoughtful tribute editorials on the liberal blog Huffington Post from his (more leftist) friends and colleagues within the entertainment industry like Ben Stiller. He was apparently well-liked, even if I later found out that because of his rather public post-9/11 conversion from liberalism to Bush Republicanism, he supposedly lost alot of Hollywood jobs, even according to him no gigs in a ten month span. Now that's a pity because Silver was a rather greatly underrated actor, and who cares about his ideology? Now its one thing if (like Patricia Heaton) he blindly hated gays or whatever retarded nonsense that shouldn't be tolerated, but otherwise...so what? Strange how I'm talking about a guy who in this decade, switched parties like me under the same Presidency, but in different directions.
Anyway, he had a solid career, and I wanted to honor him so how. The role that the trades keep bringing up was REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, and Jason Trinidad at the AwardsDaily forums also mentioned his baddie turns in the Jamie Lee Curtis actioneer BLUE STEEL and the Charlie Sheen sci-fi thriller THE ARRIVAL. But unfortunately I haven't seen them since before the last millennium and by the time I can Netflix them to properly rewatch and review them, the point would be mute, though I remember him being great in them. WEST WING fans also fondly remember him as the brash political advisor Bruno Gianelli, who summed up perfectly the failure (and lack of guts) of pre-Obama American liberalism:
Now that's some good fucking acting right there, but I can't review a TV program. So instead I'll review where I noticed Silver for the first time, the Jean Claude Van Damme actioneer TIMECOP, which was not just the Muscles from Brussels' biggest hit, but was popular enough to spawn a short-lived TV series. Now you must remember that as an action cinema buff, I've seen probably hundreds of such movies that usually follow the same genre guidelines where its hard for unique villains, much less the actors playing them, to stand out from the crowd. Hell take Powers Boothe, a great masculine presence who was particularly bland (his fault or not) in Peter Hyams' SUDDEN DEATH. Some of you snobs may think anyone can just overact and get the job done in action cinema, but it actually takes both talent and a good part to be special within that field.
So color me shocked as a kid when I did notice Silver as a (very) corrupt U.S.Senator using time travel to manipulate the stock market to shore up his treasure chest to practically buy the White House. Arrogant intelligent baddies or ruthless bastards are a dime a dozen in action cinema, and so is them berating their henchmen (though how many rough up their future Chief of Staff?). But Silver doesn't just verbally abuse his men, he makes his younger Dubya-esque goofball version his bitch. That's right, a villain who literally owns himself. That's badass. Plus, Silver in TIMECOP is someone who isn't just an asshole, but actually enjoys being one. I always appreciate when we get that at the movies.
Yeah TIMECOP is junk, and Silver's part is typical, but he makes it memorable, the sort that you remember even if you forget everything else about the picture. I mean just take his great bit of dialogue with Van Damme: "You see, I'm an ambitious Harvard-educated visionary who deserves to be the most powerful man in the world and you... you're a fucking idiot who never figured out that the only way to make anything of himself with all that fancy kicking was on Broadway." In fact, if you think about it, Silver ended up supporting a President who fits that self-entitled description. Oh the irony.
Much like many of the Bond movies, the opening of TIMECOP with some modern-day crooks hijacking a Confederate gold shipment in 1864, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but what I like is how this one crime pre-ordains the government to form a temporal police force in 1994, not because they figure that with their new time travel technology that it might be a good premptive protocol, but because it's already happened. Actions dictated by fate, the usual cinema time travel mumbo jumo, but I like that about COP.
My favorite sequence in TIMECOP has to be when we are in 1929 during "Black Tuesday," when everyone in this office building is going psychotic (with suicides galore) over the crashing stock market...except for one guy, who is whistling on his way to his office, without a concern in the world. We know immediately that something is wrong here, and we're proven right when he pulls out a copy of USA Today from the futuristic year of 2004, and pulls off the most fantastical case of Insider trading that I know of. Then pops up Jean Claude Van Damme, who's here to arrest him. The criminal jumps out a window...but Van Damme catches up to him in mid-air and both are transported back to the future. The crook is then found guilty of time traveling, and sent back in time to fall to his death.
Lethal injection is for pussies.
Van Damme also has a great scene with a shoplifter at the mall. Now this is how you make product placement badass, a rarely successful combination:
So Van Damme discovers Silver's scheme, who is the same one trying to have Van Damme's timecop agency disbanded. Talk about a conflict of interest. The great melodrama of TIMECOP is that Van Damme as an officer isn't allowed to go back a decade earlier to prevent his wife's (Mia Sara) murder, so he's damn sure won't let some asshole get away with such tampering. The dramatic clutch though is that he's now in 1994 to stop the politician...and his woman's fate gets intangled once again.
In Hollywood, something like TIMECOP would be what professionals would call a "high concept" movie or a cool, rather enticing pitch, and like many such pictures, the plotting fails to deliver on the promise of the premise. I really wish TIMECOP could have been something much more rewarding than simply a high tech/no-brains action film with questionable plotting from a silly face-turn to where the vehicles disapear to once the time cops go through the portal, but as I've said before: "for better or for worse, movies are what they are, nothing more."
For its worth, TIMECOP is a good by-the-book genre picture that isn't just the best Van Damme movie (which aint saying much, though I haven't seen JCVD), its perhaps his mainstream appealing outside of us action cinema nerds. It's like simpleton VERTIGO, or a macho TIME AFTER TIME for the guns and martial arts nerds.
Perhaps I must thank director Hyams, who at his best is a dependable helmer of solid entertainment like 2010 and CAPRICORN ONE. He never stirs up innovation, but he does get the job done in bringing home the bacon, even if the climatic setpiece for TIMECOP is a shameless Xerox of PATRIOT GAMES (just watch the climax where the thugs chase the wife up her home's roof), which wasn't exactly that good in the first place. Then again, this is the same Hyams who found a way for Boothe to be bland, and also shot that turkey A SOUND OF THUNDER, which was only noted in the press at the time for Ben Kingsley horrendous hairpiece.
Like any other Van Damme picture, TIMECOP has him doing an incredibly painful-looking nut split, getting brutalized into a bloody pulp, and unfortunately showing off his ugly ass. What's with the dude's Jesus Christ personification? Thankfully this time, we're bribed with a topless Sara, so it's an equal trade for us if you ask me. In fact, I wonder why Sara's acting career never amounted to anything, in spite of being seemingly eternally lovely. Does Hollywood still hold LEGEND against her?
TIMECOP also suffers for having those idiotic futures that Hollywood is guilty of usually producing that is more concerned with trying to look futuristic than actually being logical. You know the look, how we all drive incredibly ugly giant impractical tanks for cars, how we use cards to open our front door, everyone has a laser gun, everything looks either shiney or gritty, etc. The biggest laugh I got was from the nerd jerking off while wearing his Virtual Reality helmet. Remember how all the cyperpunk authors of the Reagan and Clinton Decades were utterly convinced that future people would get lost in their ficitonal electronic-produced alter-egos for days at a time, prefering it to real life?
Now excuse me, but RRA has got some WORLD OF WARCRAFT to play. Meanwhile, you check out more of Silver's work like REVERSAL OF FORTUNE or that Meryl Streep drama SILKWOOD or THE WEST WING reruns on Bravo or goddamn TIMECOP. You'll win either way as far as I'm concerned.