In the dystopic future of 2008 London, hard-bitten cop Harley Stone (Rutger Hauer) and his new partner Dick Durkin (Alastair Duncan) are hunting for a serial killer.
Plagued by visions of the killer’s victims, and taunted by the killer himself, Stone is in a race against time to halt its murderous spree before it reaches its final victim…
If you follow this blog you might have noticed a long space between posts.
Frankly, I just haven’t been feeling that inspired. I have watched a lot of movies, including some that I intend to write about, but nothing was giving me a burning desire to write.
And then I watched Virus and Split Second. Sometimes it takes a movie the likes of these titles to get you back in the groove. And these are the kinds of movies that made me want to write about film in the first place.
Like Virus, Split Second is a movie cobbled together from other sources.
To its credit, the resulting confection feels like the best kind of genre bender.
Set in a flooded London - an effect of climate change - Split Second has a bleak, though tongue-in-cheek, take on the urban dystopia of earlier efforts like Blade Runner.
The flooded environments are evocative, and the sets are cluttered with interesting details that carry on the used future aesthetic that became standard in the previous decade.
This is a movie that takes pleasure in its pulpy foundations. It feels like a missing feature from the comic book 2000 AD, filled with graphic compositions filled with striking colour and depth of field.
Hauer is clearly relishing the tough guy archetype, playing into the broad strokes of the archetypal American action hero. Like his Hollywood roles, there is a twinkle to Hauer’s performance that rides the line of self-awareness without calling across as too broad.
Hauer is positively earnest compared with the rest of the cast.
While he is surrounded by British actors who are playing British characters, that context is purely geographical - the characters, their dialogue and behaviour are from a completely different country - the hardboiled, overheated world of American cop movies.
On top of the bizarre mise-in-scene, that disjunct in characterisation and performance adds to the movie’s dreamlike atmosphere.
That atmosphere might not have been entirely intentional.
Split Second’s production was somewhat chaotic.
The script was in constant flux - it started out as a thriller about a satanic serial killer in contemporary LA - and the film’s credited director, The Burning’s Tony Maylam, had to step out before the end of the tight (eight week) shooting schedule.
As a final obstacle, the concept and design of the film’s otherworldly antagonist was only decided at the last minute.
Whatever the offscreen chaos, it does not so much show onscreen as infuse it on a cellular/celluloid level. Despite its familiar bones, there is a wildness and unpredictability to Split Second that is fascinating.
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