The return of The Split
Beware the smile of the crocodile!
I guess the sense of foreboding after nearly two years wait should have been a clue but this two parter Christmas special seemed like a 12 part series over the festive season and December’s end with more of a whimper than a bang!
The snag with this trite and empty disaster is that we care not one single jot about any of these people ostentatiously all rich lawyers and why would you?
The characters are all smiles and stab you in the back lawyers bent on exploiting their skills that even at a family wedding they cannot shine their lip gloss fast enough to return to type.
Nicola Walker is lost and underused here and resorts to acting with her eyes and lips like a latter day S'wellen from Southpork! The always reliable Stephen Mangan’s character is written to give her the perennial male foil to The Split who curiously seems to be the only human amongst the crocodiles. At once now a male joke of the cuckold ex-husband with his new found enforced freedom, he gets an ear piercing for them all to laugh at and his gypsy locks got a little longer but he also is lost as this character mourns the ’split' from his cheating wife who we are given to understand has turned down the amorous advances of fellow lawyer Toby Stephens. Yeah right!?
These people go for a family wedding in a Spanish Villa so grand it makes the Corleone’s look cheap. We care not one jot for these shallow wealthy crocodiles and devious legal wranglers where the women put their seemingly natural talents for back stabbing bitchiness [Chauvinism anyone?] to task, then barely break gear when it comes to returning to type given half a chance.
The ‘token’ black vicar tries to understand why his white wife won’t marry him as she is finally revealed to be 6 weeks pregnant.
As for the youngsters due to get married abroad at his families own chapel (don’t you have your own chapel in YOUR grounds?) that they are rich enough to fly off the handle like toddlers at his parent's big reveal and vacuous affair. They storm off like four year old toddlers throwing a tantrum that something is not ALL about them. They decide (of course) once the son is ‘found’ by hilariously obvious navel gazing to finally go ahead with the wedding on the beach in 'their own way'! Of course that’s how we would have done it!
The darkly attractive younger sister gets shot of her current amor as she is so bored by now she is trying a purely gratuitous mixed race lesbianism fling with one of the drivers!
The matriarch gazes on her baby crocodiles with a pride bordering on Machiavellian drool. And the men are largely mere bovine stooges barely able to keep up. Risible stuff and if they were hit by a Spanish storm or sunami we would all be better off and care less!
But you knew that right?, the women here do not come over well, vacuous, glamorous, the plain but brilliant lawyer (Walker) stumbles through this emotional chaos with a level of eye and lip gloss over-acting she barely needs dialogue but is provided with none to speak of.
The ‘family’ of harridans cannot wait to get back to lawyering up and the smiles of the crocodiles as fake as the tans, return soon after the drama is exposed and the tears are but momentary and fake as you like when returning to type they can argue the toss of a prenup drunkenly scribbled on a cafe napkin (as if!?) and the Spanish matriarch is admired as being savvy enough to expose her philandering husband and get shot of him just a mere week short of having to lose £5 million if she misses the divorcee deadline from the stunted little husband so enamoured of a seven foot leggy blonde he forgoes all the multimillion pound villa for a set of chest implants and a clothes horse so transparently parodied here, why he has even done ‘it’ before! Apparently a serial adulterer, the wife has stuck around for the money until the timing is pressing hard on her wallet. Of course
As I say risible and desperately shallow stuff this return after two years but Machiavelli and Chauvin eat your hearts out it’s the female of the species of crocodiles that is more deadly than the toothless male! Written by would be bodice ripper lite
Jilly Cooper or Jackie Collins on steroids more Mills & Boone on meth! But no gazpacho and rioja for this lot!
Avoid! Unless you fancy a really good unintentional laugh
