Verdict
Summary
From director Ted Kotcheff, who directed this just prior to making First Blood (which was released the same year), Split Image is a very earnest, if a bit overwrought drama about how an impressionable mind is completely shifted by a cult leader.
Plot:
An all-American college athlete joins a cult and forsakes his former life in its entirety, and his family hires a deprogrammer to kidnap him and bring him back home.
Review:
Danny Stetson (Michael O’Keefe) is a bright, shining example of the All-American college athlete with a gleaming future ahead of him. He’s an incredible gymnast on his way to the Olympics, and he has the love and admiration of his parents (played by Brian Dennehy and Elizabeth Ashley) and younger brother, and there’s nothing in the way of stopping his future from delivering it all. When Danny meets a beautiful young woman named Rebecca (Karen Allen) in a coffee shop by chance, they begin dating, but she’s not your typical college girl: Her focus is in community service and in bringing more young people into the fold of Homeland, a sprawling commune of young people who worship God and His prophet, a magnetic man named Neil Kirklander (Peter Fonda) who has an almost hypnotic power over his legions of followers. At first, Danny is skeptical, but soon falls under Kirklander’s spell like everyone else, and before long he becomes Kirklander’s favorite case study and is renamed Joshua in his initiation ceremony. As Joshua, Danny renounces his former life, forsaking his parents, his studies, and his aspirations as an athlete, attending only to the needs of Homeland and a life of celibacy, but because he and Rebecca (formerly Amy) are in love, this complicates matters. Meanwhile, Danny’s parents hire an intrepid and obsessed deprogrammer named Pratt (James Woods, who almost overpowers the film with his intensity) to track Danny down and kidnap him, bringing him back home to deprogram his brainwashed mind. With experience in these matters, Pratt knows exactly how to dig deep into Danny’s psyche and bring Danny back from the brink.
From director Ted Kotcheff, who directed this just prior to making First Blood (which was released the same year), Split Image is a very earnest, if a bit overwrought drama about how an impressionable mind is completely shifted by a cult leader. I’m not sure I was able to buy into Fonda’s Kirklander’s philosophy and I was far more skeptical of how the events played out than the movie wanted to be perceived. Maybe it was how Fonda’s character was presented (I never saw him as a threat), and his entire commune agenda didn’t seem dangerous at all, in fact, it operated in peace and didn’t have a negative impact on either the world or the environment, other than having its followers forsake their old lives. Maybe if the cult had been presented as sinister with an evil agenda perhaps I would’ve seen Kirklander as more of a threat. In any case, when the James Woods deprogrammer character really enters the picture, the movie becomes a thriller, and while that, in theory, should be a proper development, I found the character to be very overpowering and almost a loose cannon in how he was presented. I liked the plot and the actors, and the pieces of the film more or less fit together, but somehow the movie as a whole is uneven and needed a good, strong glue to make it congeal.
Kino Lorber’s new release of Split Image on Blu-ray looks and sounds up to their high standards in a new HD Master from a 2K scan of the 35mm interpositive. There’s a new audio commentary by filmmaker and film historian Daniel Kremer, plus the trailer.
