It's been too long since I hopped back to the early 90s for some more of the kind of action thriller fare that Sky Movies used to make such a fuss about the premieres of. I actually thought I'd seen Split Second before but I didn't remember any of it. It must have been another of Rutger Hauer million 1990s action or sci-fi flops.

In this he plays a maverick cop who operates close to the edge while chasing a serial killer who may have killed his partner several years beforehand, helped out by an unwanted new partner, and chastised regularly by his superiors for his behaviour. Well, shit, how many more sodding action thriller cliches do you want to chuck in there?

How about flashbacks to said crime, lots of cigar chomping, an apartment that looks like a bomb's hit it, and some badly placed one-liners? Actually, the gratuitous shower boob shot from Kim Cattrall is an unexpected bonus, but when you're marking that out as the only original moment in the film, you're struggling. There are no other original thoughts in the head of this one.

Clearly, you do need some semblance of a budget to portray a futuristic London (2008 - oh dear) that is supposed to be mostly submerged in water after catastrophic floods to do with global warming or something, but it has no budget so the characters spend most of the film sploshing around in a few inches of water. There's supposed to be a rat infestation but you see no more than you do in London normally.

Elsewhere, Ian Dury pops up in a cameo as a club owner and plays one of the few characters in the film that actually seem to be from Britain, let alone London. Alan Armstrong and Pete Postlethwaite somehow get roped into it and shout and moan at Hauer a lot. He spends the whole film doing the 'gruff action hero growling voice' thing and overacting wildly. Cattrall rocks a weird Geisha girl hairdo and doesn't do much else. He's called Harley, by the way. He owns a Harley-Davidson.

Yeah, it was pretty awesome, you should see it!