At times, it almost seems too cerebral for the notoriously one-note star.
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Produced by Evil Dead duo Sam Raimi and Robert Tappert and based on the Dark Horse comic book series of the same name, Timecop is truly high-concept stuff, the kind you wouldn’t normally associate with an actor of Van Damme’s calibre.
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The movie may benefit from a larger budget than Van Damme fans were used to, but in terms of characterisation and plot it’s still B-movie fare masquerading as blockbuster spectacular. For an action star who had mainly excelled in trash cinema, this came with its own set of problems, namely a story and characters that lacked punch. It doesn’t compare to the likes of Total Recall, Terminator 2 or Demolition Man, all of which had vastly superior budgets, but in terms of serious filmmaking it’s something of a leap forward. Timecop, which remains Van Damme’s highest-grossing movie as a lead actor ( Street Fighter managed an equally impressive $99,400,000), is also one of his better movies in terms of technical nous and production values. A couple of late-90s howlers reduced him to a plethora of direct-to-video outings by the time he reached the noughties, but the guy had one hell of a run. He was still a valuable asset for a few years, levelling off at around $50,000,000 per movie. Following Street Fighter: The Movie, the actor’s stock as a truly mainstream draw plummeted. de Souza came calling with the chance of headlining blockbuster video game adaptation Street Fighter: The Movie, he became the third action star on the tips of everybody’s tongue.
When he finally broke the $100,000,000 mark with Timecop and longtime screenwriter-come-director Steven E. Universal Soldier ($95,000,000), and Nowhere to Run ($52,189,039) proved that Van Damme was no one-hit wonder. Like many martial artists looking to make the jump to silver screen heroics, the actor made his name in the B-movie realms of cult production company The Cannon Group, 1988‘s Bloodsport and 1989‘s Kickboxer each making $50,000,000 internationally from budgets in the region of $2,000,000, and it would only get better for the Belgian-born star as we moved into the 90s. In fact, Van Damme’s stock had been quietly growing under the noses of the industry’s action super heavyweights during the late-1980s, at least on non-American shores, the success of his highest-grossing movies largely attributed to his popularity in Europe. He wasn’t Schwarzenegger or Stallone, but he was as close as he’d ever get, and he was a million miles away from the bargain-basement days of No Retreat No Surrender and Cyborg. Arnie and Sly were on an entirely different planet to everyone else commercially, but there were plenty of stars who would guarantee butts in seats, and in 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme was near the top of that list.Īt that point in his career, and with John Woo’s hyper-stylish Hard Target already under his belt, Van Damme was hot shit in Hollywood. Schwarzenegger’s biggest commercial rival, Sylvester Stallone, gave us Demolition Man, which in many ways felt like a direct response to Arnie’s landscape-shifting commercial juggernaut, sci-fi helping the Austrian-born star to finally usurp his American counterpart at the box office. Dick adaptation Total Recall got the decade off to a bang with its mesmerising brand of high-concept dystopia and in-your-face violence, but it was James Cameron’s monumental Terminator 2: Judgement Day, then the most expensive film ever produced, that led to something of a sub-genre boom, one that stretched from blockbuster spectaculars to the B-movie doldrums.
Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent Phillip K. To be a truly global action star, you needed one under your belt.
Action sci-fi movies were all the rage back in the early 90s.
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