zardoz-13 Aside from its premise, "Timecop: The Berlin Directive" shares little in common with the Van Damme original. Like the Muscles from Brussels, Lee is a competent martial artist who performs fights with convincing pugnacity. Veteran TEC agent Ryan Chan (Jason Scott Lee of "Back to the Future 2") Lee fears he has been time jumping a few times too many. He complains about losing pieces of himself in those various eras. Chan isn't the only one concerned about the toll that too much time jumping is exerting on TEC agents. An exasperated female physician, Doc (Mary Page Keller of "The Negotiator"), complains vociferously that the agents aren't given enough turn around time. She argues, "We're suspending them in their own reality, and ripping them back and forth through time." She has evidence that cerebral hemorrhage has impaired one agent. Nevertheless, O'Rourke (John Beck) keeps sending his "go-to boy" Chan back into the breach. Villainous Brandon Miller (Thomas Ian Griffith of "Excessive Force") wants to change history out of a sense of moral duty. "I'm just saying if time travel is possible," Miller opines, "we have a moral obligation to right the wrongs of the past." Chan thwarts him early on in Berlin when Miller attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He manages narrowly to save Hitler's life by knocking aside Miller and shooting Miller's wife Sasha as she is about to shoot Hitler. Miller winds up in prison, but this wily fiend manages to escape and put the status quo into real peril. Since "Timecop 2" lacks the beefy budget of its predecessor, "Slapshot 2" director Steve Boyum and "Furious and the Furious" scenarist Gary Scott Thompson have changed the focus ideas instead of big action. They advocate that time must remain the same. Interestingly enough, they introduce a new source of antagonism. The Society for Authenticity sends people back to observe the past so that we remember it correctly. This organization creates no end of danger, and Miller is the chief example. "Timecop 2" does some other things differently, too. They don't launch them the same way they did in the Van Damme epic. Instead of riding a rocket sled toward a dead end wall, they sit in a chair and particles bombard them. Despite its straight-to-video look, Boyum's thriller is still pretty entertaining. Boyum and Thompson lace the action with exposition straight out of the original movie. John Beck is suitably gruff as Chan's boss. Mind you, Boyum is no Peter Hyams, but he stages the action with a modicum of style.

Paul Andrews Timecop: The Berlin Decision starts in Berlin in 1940 where Time Enforcement Commission (T.E.C.) agent Ryan Chan (Jason Scott Lee) manages to prevent renegade Society for Historical Authenticity agent Brandon Miller (Thomas Ian Griffith) from assassinating Adolf Hitller & preventing both the Holocaust & World War II & thus changing history. Back in 2025 & Miller is sent to prison while Chan feels burned out, then suddenly T.E.C. agents start to disappear from the time-line. It turns out that Miller has escaped from prison & is going back in time eliminating the T.E.C. from history so they never existed & therefore no-one ever stops him from assassinating Hitler, Chan realises this & sets out on a mission across time to find Miller & stop him from killing his parents & restoring time to how it was...Directed by Steve Boyum this was a straight-to-video/DVD sequel to the rather good Jean-Claude Van Damme sci-fi action flick Timecop (1994) & a subsequent short-lived TV series of the same name which ran for a meagre nine episodes in 1997 before it was canned, while it's not a complete disaster & not as bad as I expected that's still no sort of recommendation & it's certainly nowhere near as good as the JCVD original. As the title suggest the films main plot revolves around an assassination attempt on Hilter in Berlin by a time-traveller which JCVD's replacement Jason Scott Lee has to foil & thus sets up the rest of the film. I did like the idea of the theme revolving around the moral questions about time-travel & whether it should be used to rectify past events like preventing the death's of eleven million innocent people as a result of Hitler & World War II rather than a plot that revolves around some bad guy wanting money &/or power. Unfortunately not much is made of this angle & Timecop: The Berlin Decision quickly descends into a series of cheap action set-pieces in which B-Movie action stars Griffith & Lee battle it out across various points in time as Chan has to defeat Miller & prevent him from killing his parents & thus erasing him from history. At only 75 minutes (minus end credits) it moves along like a rocket & to be fair it never bored me although with such a short duration some of the exposition & set-up feels rushed. There is also one major time-travelling plot-hole, as Miller goes back in time to erase the T.E.C. agents from history they are seen to just disappear in the present of 2025 yet Chan & everyone else still have memories of them which if they never existed in the first place they wouldn't & rather contradictorily it's also specifically stated everything the erased agents did would now be undone.The special effects look really cheap here, this is Playstation stuff with really bad CGI computer effects. The way the agents travel back in time is different than in the original too. Some of the period sets look good while other's look like cheap theme park recreations. The action scenes are alright but consist mainly of a few martial arts fights, there's no big action set-pieces which is a disappointment. The opening sequence set in Berlin features the most unconvincing Adolf Hitler impersonator ever, Jason Scott Lee himself could have done a better job. The opening text talks about time being 'breeched' which is just ridiculous since it should be spelt 'breached', the word breeched as it's spelt with two e's means put in trousers! I also love the scene in which three cops try to beat Chan up because he bumped into one & made him drop his doughnut!The budget was probably fairly low but the production values are decent enough & it tries to vary it's location & point in time which gives it some variety. Shot in Los Angeles in California. The acting isn't anything special, Lee does alright & a bleached blonde Griffith is an OK villain.Timecop: The Berlin Decision is a reasonable if unspectacular sequel to one of JCVD's best films & while it's not as good as the original it passes 75 odd minutes harmlessly enough & a fast paced story means you won't get bored or have to long to think about the plot-holes.

lucresi123 Jason Lee's pecks are back! If that's what you are looking for, look no further. If not, better move on...But about the movie. Clichés galore, some poorly shot but kinda exotic fight scenes (used JKD) and lots of bad acting & cheap effects. Poor Lee looks like he's in pain throughout the movie, and no wonder. Not a pleasant comeback.The movie doesn't even cut it as a B-movie - sure, there was a Germanish bleached blonde Rutger-wannabe bad guy, but no gratuitous sex scene or even a single booty shots. None. Zip. Nada. Even in Starship Troopers 2 they had the common sense to include the mandatory nudie scenes (as for rest of my comments on that excellent piece of classic cinema excellence, please refer to our upcoming review on that mind-blowing sequel...). I did get the feeling that the writer was taking his revenge on somebody with this - thus I won't get into the "plot" of the movie or pretty much anything else related. Except that it did have some non-heterosexual overtones, so 'nuff said.However, this movie has one thing going for it - no Jean-Claude :)

Leigh Loveday All I can say is that I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. Wonder how many they'll have time to churn out before Van Damme gets desperate enough to want to do one himself, gleefully shoving aside everything that came before and thus ruining the continuity of the series? (Not many, judging by Derailed.)Hang on, though - continuity? Not one of Timecop 2's strong points, and at the end of the day the only reason Timecop 1 didn't contradict itself at every turn was because it kept the actual time travelling at a modest level. Timecop 2 ventures into Nazi Germany, the Wild West and various other places, ultimately making only the most halfhearted attempt to imagine (let alone visualise) the consequences of changes made to the timeflow. One of the characters mentions a mysterious war a couple of times. Someone else gets an eyepatch, then loses it again. Oooo! Change my pants.Worse: it's boring. While small mercies are appreciated - such as Jason Scott Lee being given a new character rather than trying to be passed off in Van Damme's role (which wouldn't have surprised me) and being marginally more charismatic than the total nobody who starred in the TV series - they're not enough to save the film from inconsequentiality. Neither is Lee's hair, which remains rooted in the late 70s. You'd think he'd be able to do something about that at least, being a Timecop and everything.Queuing up behind the leading man is the usual racially diverse but underused and pointless supporting cast, including a limp Thomas Ian Griffith as the baddie. Any and all attempts to make us sympathetic to Griffith's cause fail because of his fundamental Hollywood Baddieness compounding the gaping holes in the plot and reasoning: on one hand I suppose we should be grateful that the writers tried to ask 'meaningful' questions and stray from the standard good/evil action film templates, but on the other hand, if you can't do it properly then don't bother, because you'll end up with nowt but plot holes, mixed messages and viewers trying to stay awake just for the big fight at the end. Which isn't that good anyway, apart from the bit with the shirt. Tsk.