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.
Review of Timecop: The Berlin Decision
