Jan
25
This is what happens when my girlfriend goes out of town for the weekend: I put on my jacket and go to Cinefile and rent “Split Second,” starring Rutger Hauer. Why? Well, the pull quote on the DVD cover told me it’s “‘Blade Runner’ meets ‘Alien.’” Now I love “Blade Runner” and I love “Alien.” So it stands to reason that “Split Second” is twice as lovable as either film it’s biting. Amirite?
Well, “Split Second” isn’t terrible. That’s probably the nicest thing I can say about it. I guess it’s like “Blade Runner” because it’s a movie that has Rutger Hauer in it. And it’s like “Alien” because it has a toothy beastie with a predilection for ripping open people’s chests in it. To be honest, it’s more like a rain-soaked “Predator 2″ than anything else.
In the year 2008 (lulz), London is enduring a downpour of biblical proportions due to the voodoo science known as “global warming.” A rogue cop with the unlikely name of Harley Stone (Hauer) is on the trail of a brutal serial killer who tears people’s hearts out. Stone carries a hand-cannon that pales the little popgun RoboCop keeps holstered in his thigh. I thought that bobbies didn’t carry guns in England. I also thought people in England had English accents, but Stone sounds like an American.
Stone essentially embodies every hero cop stereotype there ever was. He generally wears dark clothing and sunglasses even at nighttime; he treats his badge like an all-access pass; he subsists on a diet of unhealthy foods; he prefers to work alone; he speaks condescendingly to his superiors but somehow is never fired; he lives in an apartment that looks like a demilitarized zone; he’s emotionally unavailable in whatever tenuous relationship he enters into, et al.
Stone desperately wants to catch the killer because — wouldn’t you know it — the bastard murdered his partner, yet another hero cop stereotype. Tracking the monster down proves to be difficult, which I found odd, considering that the creature is apparently 10 feet tall and running around a metropolitan area. Stone also has some sort of psychic link to the beast; they’re both Scorpios or something. So Stone’s apparently the shittiest cop in the not-too-distant future. He can’t find a ten-foot monster in a major city that he’s psychically connected to. Elevating the confused storyline to new heights of WTF-ness, the creature not only tears out his victims’ hearts, but fuses their DNA with his. I have no idea why this happens, as it’s never really paid off in any substantive way. But they talk about it a couple of times like it’s important.
Kim Cattrall is in the movie, and because the filmmakers didn’t want me to get bored and turn off the flick, she takes a shower. Funnily enough, she was still growing back her hair from having recently played the Valeris in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” so her temples are stubbly. I found this not to be a dealbreaker in my evaluation of her hotness.
“Split Second” is one of those movies that used to take up space on the shelf at the video store. It doesn’t have a cult, like so much other fodder that died in theaters but found an audience on video. Films of its like just sort of exist, alone and unwanted. They never were sequelized, never remade. They came and went. The film’s apparently so forgettable, even Hauer fails to mention it in his autobiography, “All Those Moments.” I think I should start doing semi-regular reviews of forgotten failures, movies not unlike “Split Second.” I mean, film that apes “Blade Runner” and “Alien” certainly has its heart in the right place…even if that heart’s ultimately ripped out by a monster from outer space.
-Brad Lohan
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