Split Second can be purchased on DVD at Amazon.
THE ACTION/ADVENTURE SECTION — A weekly column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
Taglines
- He’s seen the future… now he has to kill it. He’ll need bigger guns.
- 2008. The future has never looked more dangerous.
I do promise to continue mixing things up with The Action/Adventure Section. But after last week’s Wanted: Dead Or Alive adventure, I just had to go even further down the Rutger Hauer rabbit hole to a film whose box art has always intrigued me and finally sucked me in with the power of its awesomeness.
Within the first 10 minutes of 1992’s Split Second:
- It is established that the film takes place in a semi-apocalyptic London of 2008 in which global warming has brought about severe flooding.
- We meet a wild eyed and insane Rutger Hauer playing a tough future cop named, I kid you not, Harley Stone. Stone is hunting some kind of serial killer with a connection to his past.
- A rough approximation of the following dialog takes place between Stone’s angry police chief and a subordinate: Chief: “Stone survives on nothing but coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate.” Subordinate: “I heard he’s the best.” Chief: “He is.”
- Said angry police chief assigns a new partner to Stone, who insists that he “works alone” and proceeds to verbally abuse his partner until they bond in future scenes.
Those first ten minutes will make or break your experience, should you choose to watch Split Second. (I’m going to build a case that you should.) In those first ten minutes, I found myself pondering what was going on here. Because, as you can tell from the bullet list above, just about every rebel cop convention is thrown at the viewer in rapid succession. After the first few minutes I was convinced this was going to be the most derivative cop action ever. But then the clichés just kept coming, and I broke through into a new realization: Split Second was meta before there was meta.
The movie is played straight as a hard-R, gore and expletive-filled sci-fi action film. But at the same time it knows its roots, pays homage to what came before it, and has a little fun in the process. By the time you see Rutger Hauer’s tough guy cop apartment, you can’t possibly help but laugh along with the filmmakers. Harley Stone doesn’t just have the most nasty bachelor cop apartment in film history… they go the extra mile and actually have BIRDS flying around. At one point a bird is nesting in Rutger Hauer’s hair after he sleeps the night on his filthy couch! And, making good on the angry police chiefs earlier pronouncements… the apartment is filled with nothing but coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate. Hauer is smoking at all times in this film. They even go so far as to have him brush his teeth with coffee at one point.
So when I searched IMDB to check out who wrote this film, I was hoping to find evidence that this writer knew what he or she was doing. Turns out Split Second was written by one Gary Scott Thompson. The name didn’t ring a bell, but this weekend when you went to see Fast 6 in theaters? You were seeing characters created by this very same man. Yes, not only did Gary Scott Thompson bring us Split Second and Hollow Man, but he also penned The Fast And The Furious. So yeah, I’m going to assume that he knew exactly what he was doing with this project. (Side note: Can you imagine the royalty checks this dude gets for creating those Fast/Furious characters?!)
Further internet research teaches me that the director of Split Second (Tony Maylam) probably gets far fewer royalty checks, but does have the esteemed distinction of having written and directed The Burning, 1981’s “psycho killer not named Jason stalking camp counselors” movie. It kind of rules.
But back to Split Second. Besides being a highly self-aware cop movie, this is also a sci-fi film. And I love watching future-set sci-fi films in which we’ve already passed the date the film is set in. Split Second posits that 2008 London will be a water-logged and decaying metropolis. The funny thing about this whole element of the film is that it has almost no bearing on the story whatsoever. There are lots of flooded sets in which actors have to trudge around in really high boots. It looks pretty cool and must have made shooting on those sets fairly nightmarish. But thematically, I don’t really see how it fits in at all. And I have to respect that.
Speaking of sets… I’m fairly certain the production budget of Split Second only allowed for roughly 4 of them. Just about every scene in the movie takes place at or outside the police station, or at or outside Stone’s bird-infested bachelor pad. At least that is how it felt to me.
When it comes down to it, I think the best way to categorize Split Second is as a poor man’s Predator 2. There is a seemingly invisible killer stalking an urban jungle. He eats the hearts of his victims and leaves bizarre symbols and clues at the crime scenes, often taunting Stone personally. We eventually learn that Stone had a partner once before who may or may not have been killed by this rampaging psychopath. And that little side story allows for the introduction of a super-hot young Kim Cattrall as his ex-partner’s widow and Stone’s new squeeze. Cattrall actually does a serviceable job here as little more than a damsel in distress who obviously has to take a shower at one point, be naked, and get kidnapped. While we’re talking about Cattrall, I should point out that her haircut in this movie, intended to look futuristic, is probably the most prophetic element of the whole film as this haircut would look perfectly at home on the streets of Austin here in 2013.
If you are anything like me, you’ve been seeing the cover of this movie on video store shelves most of your life. So A) You probably saw or always wanted to see this because the cover looks totally sweet. And B) You probably know (due to that very same cover) that Stone is tracking some kind of alien/creature rather than just some serial killer. But the movie sort of strings this whole plot development along and saves the creature for the final confrontation, which was probably both wise and necessary from a budgetary perspective. But because today’s viewers will almost all certainly know that the villain isn’t human, they may be a little thrown off that the creature leaves taunting notes and zodiac signs and that type of thing at each crime scene.
It seems like the kind of thing a serial killer would do, but not so much a giant claw-fingered invisi-monster. And you know what? None of that stuff really ever ends up making any sense. Stone’s partner, who (of course) earns Stone’s respect and admiration as the film goes on, figures out some stuff about the creature because he studies the occult and astrology. But why is this undefined alien/creature/killing machine a follower of the constellations? Who knows?
The climax of the film is kind of awesome in that you finally get to see the creature. It is a bit of a hybrid Alien/Predator man in a suit deal. I found it acceptably cool. But the action in the climax is unbelievably clunky and the manner in which our heroes ultimately dispatch of the monster is laughable at best.
If you can make your way through Split Second by counting the ways in which it paints a self-referential tapestry to other, better cop movies, sci-fi films, and creature features, then you’ll probably have as good of a time as I did watching this thing. I recommend washing Split Second down with a steady supply of coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate.
And I’m Out.
Originally published at old.cinapse.co on May 28, 2013.