5 - The most overpriced DVD I ever bought*

I have a lot of free time and very few decent shops in my town. As a result I spend many days going into WH Smith, smirking at the ridiculous prices of their poor selection of DVDs then heading home.

Over the period of about a fortnight last year I must have gone into Smith's pretty much every day and every day I was tempted by Timecop on DVD for only £1! I remembered it being pretty bad and as I saw it, films from your teenage years are rarely as good as you remember them.

Eventually I relented due to the pressure from my friend who was working in Smith's at the time mixed with the view that I was probably being too hard on the film. My film taste has after all changed drastically as I have matured. I now have a near-perverted adoration for the big dumb action films that I didn't appreciate when I was a gormless teen. In this case I was wrong to give it a second chance.

Timecop is still bad.

Like really, really bad.

You know those films that are so bad they're good? Then there are films that are so bad, that they're just bad. Timecop is somewhere below them.

It's even worse than I remember. So much so I actually started regretting my purchase. I was feeling guilt as if I'd just splurged out £500 on a new TV to find out that it was a piece of shit. For a quid I could have bought a really good pastie.

It's just so bad.

You haven't seen it? Don't, it's bad.

You have seen it? Then you know it's bad.

You don't think it's bad? You're wrong. It's really, really, really bad.

I suppose I should qualify my staunch view of Timecop's badness. It's ludicrous for a start. Not the good kind, but the crappy, ridiculous, riddled with plot-holes, poorly made kind of ludicrous. The action is mediocre at best, which is unforgivable coming from the star of Blood Sports, Hard Target, Desert Heat, The Quest and Universal Soldier.

The whole film rushes from start to the finish without achieving anything more than a bewildered feeling of 'This film shouldn't be this bad, but somehow it is.' Even the one-liner at the end is bad. As a general rule one-liners are brilliant. Timecop's barely makes sense.

'Same matter can't occupy same space.' Sure I know nothing about physics etc. but what?

JCVD immediately follows that up with 'I'm still kicking - I must be on Broadway.' What the hell? Sure he roundhouse kicks the bad guy from the past/present into the version of himself from the future/present and creates some kind of being that vomits in on itself - but still, what?

Timecop's two taglines are both bad too.

'They killed his wife ten years ago. There's still time to save her.' - That's bad.

'Murder is forever...until now.' - That's really bad.

It's so bad.

I've tried convincing myself that Timecop was worth a quid to repeatedly watch the scene in which JCVD does the splits onto a kitchen worktop to avoid getting electrocuted by a Taser pinging into his wet kitchen floor (quite,) but it just isn't.

When a film is only £1 and is still criminally overpriced, you know it's bad.
*not really