I just saw this movie this evening as part of a promotional screening. This movie wants to be a strong moral tale about how humans should not mess with time travel for fear of disturbing our natural evolution. However good Ed Burns is as the lead, you are never convinced by the story as it is full of clichés and seemingly tacked-on action sequences. They get chased by monsters for so much of the movie you start to ask yourself it they got confused between the sci-fi and horror genres. The special effects are plentiful, however they are atrocious, fake and gratuitous in the sense that the camera lingers on CG monsters and landscapes for so long that it seems perhaps they wanted to show off how much money they spent. But it adds nothing to the otherwise weak plot, which - now that I think of it - has a simplistic comic-book quality to it. But if the latter were completely true it should be more surreal and not have so much awful superfluous dialogue that actually just sounds like it is set on repeat ('you don't know what you are messing with in time travel..' and the like). If you happen to have nothing else to see, rent Timecop. Yes, this movie is that bad. P.S. Ben Kingsley, why did you do this movie? After seeing you in so many wonderful movies, even as a great villain in Sexy Beast, this performance just looked like you were making a bad used-car salesman impression.

Yeah sure, the movie its visuals already did looked horrible and not very promising but the premise and the cast looked good, so I still sort of expected to be entertained by this movie. This however unfortunately wasn't the case. The premise is good but the story is filled with improbabilities and is logically flawed.

This movie is potential flushed down the toilet. The main plot is interesting and somewhat original. It's good enough to make a good adventurous movie out of would you think. This movie however fails to entertain and I think that that is this movie biggest flaw. Perhaps it takes itself too serious and a little bit more humor certainly wouldn't had done the movie any harm. Instead it now is nothing more than a lame and cheap looking movie, filled with the one unlikely event after the other, that also steals a bit too much from other, more successful movies. Mainely "Jurassic Park" obviously.

The characters also don't help to make the movie any more compelling or at least interesting to watch. I still think that Edward Burns did a fairly decent job as the 'heroic' main lead. The rest of the characters however really get muddled in into the movie and they get very little interesting to do. The movie rather relies on its visual, which are extremely poor. Catherine McCormack also plays a very irritating character. Basically all her character does is complain and talk about how right she was and the rest oh so wrong. Her character just isn't a likable one. And the rest of the characters...well I already have forgotten their names, I think that that is saying enough about them. It certainly is true though that Ben Kingsley's performance alone makes this movie worth watching. He is really excellent in his sort of villainous businessman role but from the moment when he disappears out of the movie the movie really goes downhill rapidly.

Visually the movie is extremely poor. It has some dreadful looking CGI effects and they couldn't even get the more simple 'blue-screen' effects look convincing in the movie. The sets are also awful and cheap looking, like they can fall over and break down every moment.

The movie never gets tense, exciting or adventurous since the story is brought in the least interesting and engaging way possible. It's a very distant movie with distant characters that fails to impress. There are plenty of action sequences but all of them are so ridicules looking and far from believable that they never get tense or good enough.

So basically this movie is lacking in everything that is needed to make a genre movie like this one a good and successful one. It's sad to see how low director Peter Hyams has sunk to the last couple of years, after making some good movies in the '70's and '80's.

4/10

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