It’s the far distant year of 2008, and global warming has caused flooding throughout London, but Detective Harley Stone (Rutger Hauer) has more problems than that, something is stalking the wet streets ripping people’s hearts out.

Paired with a nebbish new partner, Dick Durkin (Alastair Duncan) the cops try to figure out who the killer is, but it soon becomes horrifically clear that it’s a what not a who. Unfortunately, we never learn exactly what it is, though we get glimpses of a large humanoid figure with taloned figures and a dark gaping maw of a mouth.

Stone is decked out in a trench coat, sunglasses (even at night), a stogie, an addiction to chocolate, and a couple of bad-ass weapons that seem really light considering what they are supposed to be and do.

Hauer seems to be having a great time, and he has a love interest with Kim Cattrall, still fresh off her appearance in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (she sports the same haircut). There’s some nice moments and interactions between the two, but the editing of the film suggests that a lot of their scenes didn’t make the cut.

In fact, that seems to be the case for the entire film, I get the impression some of it may have benefited from a longer cut. There’s some fun stuff at work in the film, and we aren’t given a chance to explore a lot of it, and let’s get this out of the way, the climax of the film bordered on the ridiculous, I wanted something a little stronger there.

Still, the film has some fairly cool ideas and moments, and Hauer seems to be having a good time in the role, and I have always been a fan of his delivery. And there’s also some very familiar faces among the supporting cast, there’s Tony Steedman, Alun Armstrong, and the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite.

The creature design by Stephen Norrington looks cool, but everything in the film is so over lit that there’s no mystery about it or the world in which the story takes place. The image isn’t as vibrant as it could be, and I feel there could have been a better lighting design and more that the director of photography could have done. It’s too bright looking of a film, especially when we are told at the film’s beginning that day is almost as dark as night.

It had been forever since I watched this, I remember taking it home while I worked at a local video store and I remember digging Hauer, and the creature, but feeling a little letdown by the rest of the film, and honestly, a couple of decades later, it’s the same thing.