1 Terrifying Thing 'Timecop' Got Right About the Future

Besides mullets.

Spoiler alert: As usual, mild spoilers lie ahead. Also, the movie is over 30 years old, so don’t @ me.

Ah, the 20th century. A simpler time when police forces were so unproblematic that all you had to do was add a noun before the word “cop” and a studio would greenlight your movie.¹

As evidence: Kindergarten Cop. Beverly Hills Cop.² Robocop.³ And my favorite, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1994 masterpiece, Timecop.⁴

The premise of Timecop is intriguing if occasionally incoherent: Time travel gets invented, and people start pulling a Biff, i.e., they go back in time to make themselves rich in the present, whether by stealing Confederate gold bars or betting on the stock market. There’s enough illicit time travel that a new federal agency is established to stop people from trying to enrich themselves. Its top agent is a former D.C. beat cop, our man JCVD,⁵ whose wife was murdered the same day he got the job. (Talk about good news/bad news, am I right?) If only there were some way for him to bring her back…

After setting the movie up during the first Clinton term, the film fast-forwards a whole 10 years to 2004, when Van Damme is a veteran of the Time Enforcement Commission.

And, boy, do the 1994 filmmakers think things will have changed in a decade. Here are a few predictions:

• We’ll have self-driving cars. Right prediction, wrong decade. It reminds me of Gates’ Law: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”⁶ Except in this case, they overestimated what we could do in thirty years, too.

• We’d have more than two political parties. This film came out two years after Ross Perot took 19% of the popular vote running as the Reform Party candidate for president. People thought the Democrats’ and Republicans’ stranglehold on electoral politics was starting to splinter. But, look at us now! Democrats are holding stro—Oh, wait.

• White supremacy would be on the rise. One of the third parties the film envisioned? The White Supremacist Party. It believed it would garner 5% of the vote. Another prediction the film got wrong; it was missing a 0.

But the one big thing the film got right was the villain, played with panache by Ron Silver. No, he isn’t a mafia don or a bank robber. He isn’t a terrorist. He’s not even a genetic cyborg sent from the future to kill young Jean-Claude. He’s a…wait for it…tech billionaire who gets into politics to make the rich richer.

Young Senator McComb, who’s charged with oversight of the Time Enforcement Commission, is also corrupting its agents and sending them back in time to steal money for his presidential campaign. All the while, he’s pushing to—get this—gut the agency so that it can’t regulate him.

Remind you of anyone?⁷

Of course, it’s not a 1:1 comparison with Elon. In the film, McComb starts out as a tech millionaire because he sold his stake to his co-founder, the guy that actually invented the thing. (This reads like some bizarro version of Tesla’s story.) To become a billionaire, he has to go back in time to tell his past self not to sell his stake. Then he’ll have enough money to practically buy the presidency and become even wealthier.

Let me just underline this: Timecop, a 1994 movie with a Belgian martial artist who repeats his lines phonetically, was extremely prescient about our 2025 reality.

Now I’m going to have to watch Bloodsport to see what it has to say about neoliberalism.

1. Serpico who?

2. I didn’t say it couldn’t be a proper noun.

3. Admit it. You don’t know your parts of speech, either.

4. It’s a 5-star film. Five out of ten stars.

5. Which stands for Jean-Claude Vidéo en Direct.

6. And the Trump corollary: “And they underestimate what can be demolished in ten days.”

7. It’s Elon. Elon Musk.