Stream The Coolest Time Travel Movie Completely For Free

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 31 seconds ago

For sci-fi fans, there is perhaps no trope more common than time travel. From Star Trek to Back to the Future, we are used to our favorite heroes and villains traipsing through time to either save or threaten everything that ever was or will be.

This has naturally led to fan debates over which movie best uses this trope, but those arguments are unnecessary because the answer has been staring us in the face for over 30 years. Simply put, Timecop is the coolest time travel movie ever made, and you can now stream it for free on Tubi.

Timecop Rules

Timecop (which is adapted from the Mike Richardson and Mark Verheiden story of the same name, published by Dark Horse Comics) focuses on a government agency charged with preventing crimes involving time travel. One-time cop, Agent Max Walker, gets caught in a tangled temporal tale involving a senator abusing time travel in order to fund his presidential ambitions.

After that, the senator pulls a Biff Tannen and successfully alters the future in his favor. It will take all of Walker’s skills and knowledge to save more than the world; he must save history itself.

Great performances are the cornerstone of Timecop. Ron Silver (best known for his Emmy-nominated role in The West Wing) plays the sleazy senator out to manipulate the timeline. Meanwhile, Mia Sara (best known for playing the love interest of the title character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) plays Max Walker’s wife. Finally, Walker is played by martial arts movie maestro Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose unique brand of action-schlock chutzpah transforms Timecop into something almost transcendently weird.

Reaction To Timecop

Fortunately, general audiences didn’t find the Timecop too weird once it premiered. The movie went on to gross $101.6 million against a $27 million budget. While not exactly a blockbuster success, the movie earned enough to spawn a brief-lived ABC television adaptation in 1997. Eventually, we got a direct-to-video sequel in 2003, though neither the sequel nor the television series brought Van Damme back.

The original Timecop may have impressed at the box office, but it didn’t exactly impress the critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, this film has a 42 percent critical rating. Generally speaking, critics acknowledged that the film would appeal to sci-fi fans who could suspend their disbelief and avoid asking too many questions about time travel. However, critics mostly agreed that the movie fell far short of cinematic time travel classics such as James Cameron’s The Terminator.

Watch Timecop

So, moment of truth time: why the heck am I recommending you watch Timecop, a critically reviled sci-fi film whose pop culture footprint can be measured in crappy follow-ups? First of all, despite the snootiness of critics who have historically disdained science fiction, the time-travel plot of this film is both clever and compelling. Its vision of how humans would inevitably abuse temporal mechanics for wealth and power is at once understandable and creative, and the movie as a whole truly lives up to its bonkers premise.

Mostly, though, this film is worth watching for Jean-Claude Van Damme, who previously starred in action movie classics like Bloodsport, Kickboxer, and Universal Soldier. He’s not the most emotive or expressive actor, but he makes up for it with a raw physicality that transforms what could be de rigueur film fights into beautiful displays of genuine martial prowess. Van Damme has always been a special effect unto himself thanks to his martial arts skills, and in the high-tech world of Timecop, his brand of killer kung-fu stands out even more for its delightfully precise, low-tech execution.

Will you enjoy Timecop as much as I did, or would you rather travel back in time to warn your slightly younger self not to watch it in the first place? You won’t know until you experience the intersection of action shlock and ambitious sci-fi for yourself. And if you do end up traveling to the past, don’t forget that touching your past self will kill both of you, so be very careful when slapping that remote away.

Timecop is available to stream for free on Tubi.