THE STORY: I enjoyed this movie enough to at least wash the awful taste of Eric Roberts playing the Master in the Dr. Who TV movie out of my mouth. Not that I actually had anything against Roberts either way, its just that no one can really portray the Master as well as the late Roger Delgado. ( Even though I didn't particularly hate Anthony Ainsley in the role either)

In this movie Roberts is Police detective Dylan Cooper. Cooper's a hard ass on juvenile crime. That becomes apparent when we first meet him. He comes upon a juvenile that's just murdered a woman in order to rob her. The kid says the usual stuff like "I'm only a kid! I'll be out of jail before the ink dries!", etc. Dylan then tosses the kid a gun and dares him to pick it up. When the kid does go for the pistol like a dummy, Dylan feeds him a bullet. Hey, this is my kind of cop!

Dylan and his partner Ally Marsey come across some kids selling stolen weapons. These teens stole the weapons from a group of neo-nazi skinheads. You know, the kind of guys that are definitely going to come after you for that. I can think of safer ways to steal weapons, but hey, I didn't write this. After a chase the gang of twisted teenagers escape except for one, Rusty. Rusty is of course, the 'good kid' turned bad by his awful awful friends. Dylan really doesn't want to hear the "Rusty's just misguided" bull crap. He just wants to throw the punk in jail and find his worthless friends. For that matter, Dylan would probably rather just shoot them all and be done with it. (As I said, my kind of cop...none of these delinquents seem to have any redeeming features whatsoever.) Other law enforcement officers have the same idea....law enforcers from the future. They've traveled back in time to execute these kids before they commit a series of murders in the future. There's Mr. Stone, the leader of the time travelers, Zoe, the muscle of the group (she has a robotic armored arm thing she wears that gives her super strength) and the Bookkeeper, a mousy guy that records everything for the courts.

Stone and his compatriots start wiping out Rusty's friends in a typically brutal fashion. The Bookkeeper insures that the kids are the ones they want by doing a retinal scan, and then Stone extracts their eyes from their bodies as a trophy. (Ok, this guy is kind of sick!) Dylan and Ally are looking for the scummy kids too, and when they find that someone is murdering them they take Rusty into protective custody. The Time Travelers show up, but Ally escapes with Rusty while Dylan holds Stone and company off. During this encounter Zoe is injured. The time travel technobabble in this flick says that no living tissue can exist outside of its own time. The travelers have some kind of weird coating on their bodies that keeps the effects of time displacement at bay. When Zoe's is punctured she begins to de-age. Since she wasn't even alive in this time period she regresses into an infant and I assume down to a sperm and an egg and then disappears. Dylan is naturally shocked at this, and he's rendered unconscious and captured by Stone and the Bookkeeper.

When Dylan comes to Stone tells him who they really are. he also tells him about how crappy the future is and that's why law enforcers travel back in time to execute the future bad guys. Stone convinces Dylan because he says in the future (20 years in the future) Dylan taught him everything he knows. And Stone knows details about Dylan, like how he was a bad kid once, but turned his life around. Using the Bookkeepers handy dandy little computer/tricorder thingamabob, Stone shows Dylan how Rusty will kill Ally if they don't intervene. You see, Dylan shot Rusty's father in a robbery years before. Rusty doesn't know it was Dylan that killed his dad, but according to "history" he'll find out and then kill Ally in his rage. Dylan agrees to help Stone find Rusty and execute him.

The fateful moment happens and Rusty, who has acquired a gun prepares to shoot Ally. Just then Stone, the Bookkeeper and Dylan arrive. Ally is appalled at what they intend to do. She tells Dylan that if Rusty doesn't kill her or anyone in that moment maybe he can change his future. Meanwhile, the Bookkeeper starts a countdown to the exact second where Rusty pulls the trigger. Dylan has a change of heart. He realizes that he changed from a life a crime and became a cop, so why can't Rusty change too? He gets between Stone and Rusty and when the fateful second comes Rusty puts down the gun. The Bookkeeper then announces that Rusty's future criminal record has vanished. There's no longer a need to kill him, since he has in effect, changed his future. But Stone ain't havin' none of that. He still wants Rusty's ass on a platter. When the Bookkeeper disagrees Stone shoots him. So much for future law enforcement. Stone is a whacko. He chases our heroes into a construction site and has a duke out with Dylan over this mess. Stone seems pretty willing to kill Dylan, too. Uh, but wouldn't that change his future? He said that Stone taught him everything he knew! If he kills Stone in the past doesn't that change his own fate? I don't know. Time Travel never makes sense anyway.

Just when it looks like Stone is about to win, Ally shoves a broken bottle into his back breaking his seal. But Stone only regresses into a teenager because he was born in 1981. As he says "This is a young as I'll get!" Its actually as dead as he'll get since Rusty whacks him with a blunt object sending him flying off of the construction site to be dashed on the streets below. Our heroes then find the Bookkeeper before he dies. He tells Dylan that he'll have to tell people in the future that the Program doesn't work...killing people in the past for future crimes is a pretty bad idea. The last scene in the movie is a future Dylan as a sitting judge. I'm not really sure if this is what was supposed to happen or if it was what happened because of the Rusty incident or whether these are shadows of things that might have been? Man, I need Tom Baker to explain this to me!

Speaking of Tom Baker, AKA  Dr. Who, Yee Jee Tso sure looks like the same kid in the Dr. Who TV movie. He was a juvenile criminal in that flick too. Stone was Rick Mancuso. The Bookkeeper was Saul Rubinek, and Trek fans will recognize him as Kivas Fajo, the evil collector that kidnapped Data on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes "The Most Toys".

1.)  Some movies make me not terribly afraid of guns. Like this one. There's a part in the movie where Ally and Rusty are trying to lay low but the neo-nazis that Rusty stole the guns from finds them. This skinhead guy is the worst shot in history. He's cornered Rusty in a kitchen, he has two pistols he's firing wild west style, yet he hits everything in the room but Rusty. Man, what is this guy, Mr. Magoo's disaffected nephew? As many shots as he fires he'd almost have to hit Rusty just because of the law of averages! Apparently this guy wouldn't hit the ground if not for gravity!

2.)  Dylan first arrests Rusty because Rusty is trapped in a van that's about to explode after his friends abandon him. Of course Dylan only makes it out with Rusty at the last possible moment. But why did he bother? Dylan killed another juvenile offender in cold blood in the first few minutes of this film! If he has the cajones to just blow the little brats away why risk his neck for Rusty...who just tried to kill him...when he could have sat back and let Rusty get blown to kingdom come?

3.)  At first I thought Zoe was an android of some kind, but her death scene pretty much establishes that she was human. That's why I chuckled at her show of superhuman strength. She has this armored arm thing, yeah, but she uses it to literally hold a car in place and then lift it. Maybe this arm thing has some kind of subspace field because I can't figure out how she could hold a moving car unless she weighed more than the car....or how her spine supported the weight of the car when she lifted it. I don't even think they pull stunts like that in comic books anymore.

NUDITY AND SEX:  none

HUH? :  Isn't there an easier way of stopping future crime than killing people in the past that didn't actually commit some of the crimes yet? Besides, if you kill a guy in 1990 because by 2015 or so he'll have murdered a lot of people doesn't that change history a lot? I mean what if this guy murdered someone in 1999 that was would have detonated a nuclear device in Chicago in 2005? then you'd have to go to 2005 and stop the other guy. And what if that nuclear explosion was so devastating it prompted all nations to disarm ALL nukes in the world thus avoiding a nuclear war in 2010? See what I'm getting at? It doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm reading too much into this of course, but I can't help it. man, here comes that headache again.

THE FINAL JUDGEMENT:  This flick reminds me of a time me and my buddy Gork were joking around about time travel and the usual question of "If you could would you go back in time and kill Hitler as a child so he couldn't start world war II?". the conversation soon turned into a joke fest that time travelers from the future would come back in time to kill me because I'll be a tyrannical world leader in twenty years (I can't even get my wife to listen to me so its not bloody likely....) I guess that's just to show ya how improbable time travel really is, 'cuz...hold on a minute. Someones at my door....hey, how'd that blue policebox get in here?....Who are you guys? what do you mean "exteeeerminate?"...hey.....is that a gun?......don't point it at m................................................