Review: Blue Steel

Jamie Lee Curtis is a rookie cop who gets involved in a bit of a mess when forced to shoot a convenience store robber (Tom Sizemore), and then has to explain to her superiors (Kevin Dunn and Clancy Brown) where the robber’s supposed gun has vanished to. The audience knows that Wall Street trader Ron Silver (who was in the store at the time) picked up the gun and pocketed it himself. Curtis is suspended over the incident. Silver is, it turns out, a nutjob on a power trip who becomes obsessed with Curtis and starts murdering random people with Curtis’ name on the bullets. He also manufactures a ‘meet cute’ with Curtis, and charms his way into dating her. Eventually he reveals his true self to her, but Curtis can’t seem to make charges stick to him, so he is free to terrorise her. Phillip Bosco plays Curtis’ abusive bastard father, Louise Fletcher is strangely cast as her doormat mother, the late Elizabeth Pena is Curtis’ best friend, Richard Jenkins is Silver’s clueless lawyer, and Matt Craven plays a would-be suitor for Curtis.

 

Not one of the better films from Kathryn Bigelow (“Near Dark”, “Point Break”, “The Hurt Locker”), but it’s really the screenplay by Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red (“Near Dark”, “The Hitcher”) that disappoints here in this 1990 cop movie/psycho-thriller cum slasher movie produced by the one and only Oliver Stone (“Platoon”, “Wall Street”, “JFK”). And that’s a bit of a surprise, because Red’s work tends to be pretty decent for the most part. The film just comes off as awkward, blending female “Dirty Harry” (or any other 70s cop movie you care to name) with “Halloween” sequel, and the two absolutely do not go together, at least not as written by Red in this film. Curtis needs to be both an armed policewoman and slasher movie ‘final girl’. Sure, that makes her less of a victim than say, any other girl in a slasher film, but it also means that she alternates between being hero and victim rather awkwardly. It might sound clever in theory, but watching a law enforcement officer (rookie or not, female or not) being stalked for 90 minutes isn’t all that much fun. The plot starts out somewhat interesting, but it devolves into stalking alternated with scenes of Silver getting caught, let go, and away we go again. There’s a bit too much of that. Coming from a female director, it’s rather awkward seeing Bigelow trying to have an each way bet with Curtis here. Also awkward? The whole ‘Hey, there’s a psycho killer out there obsessed with you…but let’s forget all that and fuck like rabbits, OK?’ scene. Talk about a tacked-on sex scene. Logic doesn’t tend to play a big part in slasher movies (even some of the best ones like “Child’s Play” and “The Hitcher”, if you classify those as slashers), but in cop movies and thrillers it certainly helps.

 

But look, the film isn’t awful. In fact, Bigelow is a good enough director and visual stylist to make things attractive at the very least. The lighting by Amir Mokri (“Freejack”, “Man of Steel”) is particularly excellent. The titles design is really cool, giving off a Stallone vibe with its gun/phallic motif. Jamie Lee Curtis is immediately the right casting choice for the lead. I might question the idea of blending cop movie with slasher movie, but she’s spot-on here. Also, wrongheaded mixture of genres or not, I can’t deny that there’s a slightly uneasy vibe early on here. The understated score by Brad Fiedel (“Terminator 2: Judgement Day”, “True Lies”) also gives off a slight sense of dread, to help the atmosphere of the film. The late Ron Silver immediately walks off with the film as the psycho, the film makes no bones about the fact that he’s a nutter from the word go. He’s also a Wall Street trader by day, which makes sense when you think about it. Silver (who got a few knocks late in life for having some Conservative political views, but if you do your research, he was socially relatively liberal and who really cares anyway?) is a sorely missed presence on screen, there were few performances were he didn’t give his all, and this is no exception. He’s actually genuinely unsettling here, it’s like this guy’s not even from our solar system, that’s how off his tree he is at times, and yet because he’s played by Ron Silver, he can believably turn on enough charm to seem like a relatively respectable, normal member of society, and possible love interest. He dials down the charm just a tad, though, to make himself a believable psycho. Silver isn’t just Michael Myers here, for starters, he actually has a human face.

 

I also liked the supporting turn by the versatile Clancy Brown, whose cop character is a bit of a dick at first, but soon comes around to sensing Curtis may be telling some version of the truth after all. He makes for a good arsehole, but a decent cop too. Look out for a young, skinny, and pasty-looking Tom Sizemore in his film debut as a convenience store robber. It’s a good cameo, though Sizemore’s stunt double looks absolutely nothing like him. Oops.

 

This film isn’t anywhere near as bad as you might’ve been led to believe by others. The performances are all terrific, and the film looks and sounds great. But the screenplay is a bit of a dud, unfortunately. That’s the thing when you’re a filmmaker who doesn’t make many films, you need to make sure every one of them is a winner. This is just borderline OK and probably deserves to be forgotten, aside from Silver’s excellent and rather complex turn as an unpredictable Yuppie psycho.

 

Rating: C+