Timecop remake to have grittier, more ambitious splits

By Sean O'Neal | April 10, 2014 | 3:29pm

Aux Features Film

Back in the far-off year of 2010, plans were first unveiled to remake Timecop, the 1994 film in which Jean-Claude Van Damme’s ordinary, incredibly agile and musclebound cop straddles the space-time continuum as easily as a kitchen counter. Now The Hollywood Reporter hurtles us four years into the past to revisit that bygone era, before remakes of Total Recall and RoboCop confirmed that not every late ’80s/early ’90s sci-fi film needs a reboot, with the news that the project is moving forward. Producers have handed it to screenwriters Mark and Brian Gunn, who have lately made their own career out of revisiting the past with scripts for Bring It On Again, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a big-screen version of MacGyver, and The Monster Squad remake.

Now they’ll relive someone else’s experiences all over again with a Timecop that’s said to be “a more gritty and grounded police story with the sci-fi in the background”—a film that is more Coptime than Timecop, in other words. Still, THR also notes it could be tonally similar to Looper, in that it features time travel and guns, but nevertheless “bigger in scope and ambition.” Indeed, Looper’s Bruce Willis dared not straddle anything; this Timecop could straddle the whole wide world.