London 2008. After forty days and nights of torrential rain, the city is largely submerged below water, a result of the devastating effects of continued global warming. The warnings ignored for decades have now resulted in undreamed-of levels of pollution where day has become almost endless night… Thus begins Split Second, a mix of so many other successful, dark, post-environmental-disaster science-fiction films. While the opening leads us to believe there will be a message about destroying the ecosystem, the result is an action-packed monster movie with respect only for stylish leather trench coats, heavy artillery and bloodthirsty violence.

Rutger Hauer is Harley Stone, a determined, violent and rambunctious cop with ultra-macho gear, including heavy leather boots, a lengthy black jacket, a giant hand-cannon and an all-terrain armored police Jeep. He never enters a room without letting everyone know he’s there, and doesn’t leave until something has been destroyed. He brushes his teeth with coffee, constantly has a cigarette in his mouth, and has pigeons wandering around his unkempt apartment. And for the sake of being a badass, he also has the need for sunglasses, especially in the dark.

His former partner Foster McLaine (Steven Hartley) was murdered three years earlier by a serial killer’s attack that left Stone with a grisly scar on his shoulder, and now the unhinged officer has a gut feeling that the murderer is back in town.  Stone starts in a seedy bondage strip club, looking for clues to the return of the vicious butcher. Without warning, he strikes again, this time attacking a young blonde in the restroom, leaving a torn up body with the heart ripped out, the message “I’m Back” splattered on the mirror in blood, and a trail of gore leading to the roof. When he can’t catch the perp, he returns to the precinct, showing great disregard for his fellow officers (including Pete Postlethwaite as Paulsen in a hilariously abused role). “I work alone!” he yells to his commander, but is taken off his suspension and assigned a new partner, tenderfoot Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), an intellectual but naive detective who likes to use scientific training to track similarities in the victims and the psychopathic personality of the murderer – instead of carving a hole through the city with a shotgun.

The killer continues to attack random victims, always leaving bloody clues, sometimes written on the ceiling in fluids and unceremoniously removing the hearts from his victims. There’s no motive, no patterns, and when he finally corners the creep in the morgue he unloads his .450 magnum but hits nothing. It’s as if the killer is superhuman. Stone and Durkin get bigger weapons when the murderer makes it personal and taunts Stone with a human heart in his refrigerator, and stalks the black-haired Michelle (Kim Cattrall), an old flame who Harley stole away from Foster after his death.
 
From the London Necropolis to the underground rat-infested sewers, full of tunnels, leaking water, dim lights, abandoned wreckage and general filth, Split Second spares no production value on the sets and locations.  They’re all dark, foreboding, futuristic and the perfect place for a showdown with an alien. (The poster artwork and advertisements don’t really try to hide the secret of the assassin, which is in fact not human.) The lighting and atmosphere are nearly perfect, too.  Unfortunately, style supersedes substance, with a conclusion that isn’t as well thought out as the beginning, almost as if the ending was written for a different movie, or no one could think of a satisfactory way to finish off the suspenseful horror elements they started.

- Mike Massie

 

 

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