The rules are, you cannot touch 'yourself' without setting up a fearsome rent in the fabric of time. Even in the last frames of the film, we are being presented with paradoxes, as when a weary timecop ( Jean-Claude Van Damme), having battled through the decades to set things right, returns home and is greeted by a child he has never seen before, who cries out, ' Dad!' What and where is the person, identical to Van Damme, who the child has known as Dad? Doesn't that mean there is an extra timecop around? What happens when they meet? Ah, but the movie has already answered that question, in a scene where a time-traveling evil U.S. 'Timecop,' a low-rent 'Terminator,' is the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies. And furthermore, how can a traveling timecop return to the present from the past without, in effect, traveling into the future? You see what we're up against here. That is because 'you can travel back in time, but not into the future, because the future hasn't happened yet.' Yes, but once you do travel back in time, the present becomes the future that has not yet happened.

Well, says the movie, the present is defined as Now.

Timecop movie full