Split Second and the kitchen sink approach to genre filmmaking

Trying to be everything to everyone is a recipe for disaster.

Rutger Hauer never met a script that he didn’t immediately fall in love with. The early 80’s was good to him. The mid-80’s was great to him. But the 90’s… A little scrutiny might have gone a long way. What ended up in Albert Pyun territory with his incomprehensible and sleepy riff on Red Harvest, Omega Doom, began with flashing a badge at a dog and repeatedly calling it dickhead in Tony Maylam’s schizophrenic buddy-cop actionfest, Split Second.

Split Second is a movie with a baffling reputation. I know numerous people who consider it a favorite piece of psychotronica. I, however, consider it to be an irredeemable piece of garbage that I’ve explored several times over the years in order to hopefully put a finger on whatever qualities it is that my delusional friends zero in on and identify as awesome. I’ll likely never find those qualities, however, because Split Second is an apotheosis of badness, the zenith of 80’s action movie excess given life at the absolute worst point in history for genre movies as the bland post-Cold War interim years of George Bush gave way to the American social satiety of the Clinton 90’s. Slam-bang cocaine cop freakouts were sliding in popularity. What ostensibly began with 48 Hours in 1982 peaked to perfection in 1987 with Lethal Weapon and then teetered perilously at the cliff’s edge in 1989 with Tango and Cash before plunging headlong toward doom with weirdo genre collisions like 1990’s I Come In Peace (aka Dark Angel). Science fiction won huge at the box office only a few years before with Robocop and Predator stood as a case study for Hollywood execs that not only were audiences still hungry for monster movies but that you could also match them up with the sort of sweaty tough guy action pictures that Rambo and Commando ushered in. It was inevitable that one day, a producer would come along, throw caution to the wind, and jam it all together into a single picture with gleeful abandon and no regard for the components parts that worked in other movies.

Boss posters for bad movies part 1

As I noted in my article, Boss Posters For Bad Movies, the production cycle for any given movie can change drastically between the moment a movie is pitched to a studio and the moment the studio releases it to theaters. It happens all the time but savvy producers are able to wrangle a picture that’s in flux and release a watchable movie. Not-so-savvy producers will simply foist their dumpster fire on audiences in order to recover as much cost as possible in order to mitigate damage and Split Second is a casualty of that process. It began life in 1988 as a buddy cop movie written by Gary Scott Thompson, who is best known for gifting the world with the first two Fast and Furious movies. Unlike other buddy cop actioners of the era, the original Split Second script, called Pentagram at the time, twisted up the formula with a bit of Satanism and then ended up shelved among the gluttonous menu of other satanic crime pictures of the era capitalizing on the late-80’s satanic panic paranoia. What’s not clear is whether or not the original script had a monster in it but the resulting film looks like the sort of thing that was bombarded with studio notes while in production. Split Second is a grab bag of disconnected and very tired tropes, dumped into a bucket by cynical producers that thought idiots would watch anything if the net was cast wide enough.

Split Second features:

• A burnt-out, unreliable, loose cannon psycho cop who works alone.

• A strictly by-the-books foppish new-guy cop tasked with reeling the psycho cop in.

• A grouchy police captain that can’t believe he has to deal with this shit.

• A dead partner, killed by the big bad guy.

• Partner’s old lady who the psycho cop is now in love with.

• A serial killer that leaves messages for the cops.

So far, so good. Split Second is basically every buddy cop movie that came before. Will they ever get along? Can the brass get out of the psycho cops way long enough for him to do his job? Will this pussy college boy ever shut up?

Split second features at least one distinguishing feature in an otherwise stock exercise in lazy writing. Rutger Hauer plays Harley Stone, a defiantly unlikeable cop who draws his crazy future gun on everyone he meets. Alistair Duncan plays Dick Durkin, the college-educated new guy whose name is an endless source of amusement for Stone. He’s brought in to figure out the killer and help track him down by profiling him but all he ever seems capable of is offering a constantly changing diagnosis, “Well, I at first thought that he was psychotic but now I believe him to be a full-blown psychopath!”

Split Second also features:

• A dystopian near-future setting, now in the past (2008)

• A monster that looks like every new comic book villain created by Marvel or DC in 1992.

• Satan stuff, for some reason!

The second set of features end up mucking up the works because they come in from out of nowhere, arbitrarily thrust into the picture to make it somehow stand out. The original set of buddy-cop features were simply soulless and by-the-numbers but these secondary schizophrenic distinguishing features are meant to set Split Second apart from the competition and establish it as an independent entity. It doesn’t exactly stick the landing. In 2008 London, for instance, global warming and biblical levels of rainfall causes the sea-levels to rise and place most of London underwater. As a result, the grimy, claustrophobic locations are awash in cascades of endless rain but this quality does nothing to serve the plot. It looks cool, that’s for sure, but the setting hints at a grand purpose that never emerges. It’s just that global warming was the new headline at the time.

Regarding the monster, you can find photos of this thing all over the internet and it’s not terrible, but in the lead up to its reveal in the third act you’re left with the distinct impression that it’s not a monster at all and is human, since it’s leaving messages behind for Hauer’s detective, Harley Stone, not to mention a few clues which suggest that what they’re hunting is a human who also uses the occult to its advantage. As the picture hurtles forward, however, it is gradually revealed that the killer is some kind of creature that lives in the tunnels under London. At no point does the occult angle ever come into play. It also never interacts with Stone in any way beyond trying to kill him. What the hell happened to all the clues, messages, and sigils? In the end it turns out to be some lumbering beast that the movie seems so ashamed of that it never gives you a good look at it.

It’s worth noting that the picture was directed by Tony Maylam, who Cinema Suicide readers will know from his slasher movie, The Burning, a not-half-bad horror movie notable for its brutality and cast. Evident in the final outcome, Maylam was so put-upon and weighted down by endless rewrites and demands from Hauer, that he peaced-out, mid-production, and the film had to be finished by a director named Ian Sharp and it shows. The film ends with a thousand loose ends and plot holes. No questions are answered. Why was the monster so hung up on tormenting Stone? What’s the deal with all the satanic stuff? Why was it so significant to everyone that it had traces of its victims DNA mixed in with its own? At least some exposition would have gone a long way. An explanation needn’t be a complicated thing, either. The Predator didn’t have a major backstory that required a tie-in comic, a four-part cable miniseries, and an entire prequel. It was simply explained away as a hunter. It’s just that easy and helpful. You don’t even get that here. You get a lot of suggestion and innuendo that suggests one thing and an ending that delivers something else, entirely. It’d be maddening if the movie weren’t so fundamentally broken and stupid. And then, just as it manages to drag itself over the finish line, Split Second has the balls in the final moments to tease you with a sequel.

This is my final word on Split Second. I will never understand it in the way that everyone else does. It’s trying to be too many things at one time and failing at all of them. You can look at the tropes and see exactly how it intersects with Blade Runner, Predator 2, I Come In Peace, and Tango and Cash. It is an unbelievable mess that doesn’t even net bad movie goodwill. It’s just bad and very likely marks the beginning of a career slide for Rutger Hauer that would take an entire decade to pull out of.