It’s nearly twenty years since Jean-Claude Van Damme scored his biggest hit at the box office with director Peter Hyams' slick Time Cop, a concept based on the Dark Horse comic series about a future law enforcement officer sent back to stop bad guys changing the time-ctream. Since then there’s been a blink-and-you-missed-it very short lived TV series and a very good DTV sequel Time Cop 2: The Berlin Decision which starred Jason Scott Lee, but little else. Since 2007 there’s been talk of a potential cinematic reboot but no-one appeared to be moving forward with the concept.
That may well be changing. Universal have formally announced their intention to move forward on a remake/re-imagining of the original film - taking the central idea but rebranding it for a twenty-first century audience.
While Time Cop did do incredibly well at the box office and is very entertaining, I always felt that it kind of wasted the potential of the concept…there’s the great opening sequence with a civil war convoy getting taken down by a machine gun wielding time traveller and a 1930s sequence when Van Damme’s character tackles a rogue Time agent... but then the majority of the film takes place in either the (then) present day of 1994 of within the generic time-travel base! It was a good way to save on the budget, but didn't push any creative boundaries! The short lived series had an Irwin Allen Time Tunnel feel to it, while Time Cop 2 featured plenty of time travelling (it opens with our heroes meeting Hitler in WW2 Germany, throws them through the Wild West and more) with enough paradoxes to make Bill & Ted proud! Excellent! It also featured some very nice martial arts action courtesy of the late great Jerry Poteet (one of the original Bruce Lee JKD students and Jason Scott Lee’s martial arts teacher since Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) Here’s hoping the reboot makes the most of the concept…
As with the proposed Bloodsport remake, it doesn’t look like Jean-Claude will be involved with the reboot in any capacity. It might have been unrealistic to have him as the same character we saw in the 1994 film, but there'd be enoughh potential for Van Damme turning up in cool cameo roles in both projects - perhaps as the trainer for the hero in Bloodsport and can you imagine a dark Van Damme take on being the villain in the Time Cop reboot? After all, he clearly had fun being the 'Villain' of the piece in The Expendables...
