Cast:
Jamie Lee Curtis (Officer Megan Turner), Ron Silver (Eugene Hunt), Clancy Brown (Detective Nick Mann), Elizabeth Peña (Tracy Perez), Louise Fletcher (Shirley Turner), Philip Bosco (Frank Turner), Richard Jenkins (Dawson), Kevin Dunn (Assistant Chief Stanley Hoyt), and Tom Sizemore (Robber) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (#1258 - K-19: The Widowmaker, #1548 - The Hurt Locker, #1820 - The Loveless, #2188 - Near Dark)
Review:
"What was interesting to me was kind of a heretical, irreverent look at a particular moment in time. You have this woman who's a police officer. And believe it or not, that was very difficult to get made because the police officer was a woman. I was asked to make her a man, and then we could get financing. I said no, the whole point of making this was that she was a woman. It seems so strange today to think of that as being an obstacle, but it was a big obstacle."
The road for what became Bigelow's third feature film is a tricky one. According to Bigelow, Universal Pictures had tried to develop a movie that would be about gangs in East Harlem that had her interested in writing and directing that had come after Walter Hill had been in the process of setting up a producing deal there around the time of Streets of Fire. Years later, Oliver Stone apparently was interested in doing a project but about South LA gangs...and then he got involved in Salvador and Platoon while she did Near Dark. Long story short, Stone liked that film and was interested in doing whatever she wanted to do next, complete with being producer, and Bigelow sent him, well, the script for Blue Steel, which eventually came around with Stone and Edward Pressman producing. I wonder who exactly came up with what in the script for the film, since Bigelow shares the writing credit with Eric Red; they had previously written Near Dark (1987) together, although Red has apparently labeled the script as basically a "female version of The Hitcher". Apparently, the climax of the film (you know, the gun fight) would've had Curtis nude, but she said no to that, being quoted as saying "Everyone would be watching my breasts flopping around instead of watching the scene." Bigelow in the past was quoted as having an interest in "treading on familiar territory", describing Blue Steel as a "mutation that maybe implies a different genre". The movie was released by MGM in the wake of Vestron Pictures' impending doom as a company, and the movie made a small amount of money while Bigelow next directed with Point Break (1991).
Some reviews of the time compared the movie to Halloween (1978) because of the whole boogeyman thing and having Curtis, I guess, but I don't seem to remember the part in the earlier film where the lead became a cop. But what we do have is a weird movie, one that is entertaining but stupefying in its execution to varying levels of effectiveness that tries to play two different angles: the plight of a (woman) cop that has to come to terms with who they really are when faced with rough surroundings...and also a nut that has an obsession with her and, well, things that lead him to want to shoot again and again. Technically speaking, the movie is kinetically interesting in general action while dragging along at 102 minutes to a conclusion that will befuddle the viewer in its certain positioning (ambiguity or overwrought, you might wonder) while seeming digging new ways to throw itself in melodrama. But how many films do we let certain things fall by the wayside because of our relative enjoyment, anyway? Is it nitpicking to wonder where the line should be drawn with a movie where a robbery takes place but somehow the guy in the front of it thought he saw a knife rather than, well a gun*. But Curtis does hold the film together with a generally tense performance that shows the struggle that arises with her position that only is solid when she essentially plays nice in the box she is constrained to, and that's without even mentioning her interactions with the other side of the coin of someone trapped in the strange world of struggling with their position and place. We the audience know what we know, so if someone can badger her about her method the way they do in one particular scene, imagine how is in an actual active scenario. If you're not with her and her charm that comes through even in the plight around her, then, well, the rest of the film goes down with her, for better or worse. Silver is mostly effective in evoking tension, albeit with a few obvious beats (bad enough he carves names into bullets, does he need to have voices in his head and also spout lines about death?) to go with the newfound power of a gun, which I'm sure could be interpreted in different ways**. The scenes the two share with each other are curious enough to make a worthy enough cat-and-mouse game to a certain point, being more interesting in the start and close rather than the holding down that comes with stretching things out. Brown moseys about with a casual charm, albeit with late usefulness in the long run, since it is more a movie of doubts and moods that might as well be a dreary dream. You don't exactly get much time to spend with Bosco and Fletcher[*] besides the bare minimum that comes with semi-resolved (?) family tension either. By the time the movie moves to its endgame around Wall Street, you have a movie that is frantic enough to possibly override the inevitable quibbles because it has a committed director and star that want to make an entertaining thriller. In a sea of varying effectiveness when it comes to women-leading action movies, Blue Steel is at least a solid enough recommendation to seek out for the ride it goes on in the curiosity about the nature of power and, well, the thrills.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
*I don't want to pick all the way to hell, but probably the most ridiculous idea is that our lead comes to her parents, sees a fresh bruise on her mom, arrests her dad but decides in the middle of a conversation with him in the back of the car to just...let him off with a warning to not be who he is anymore. Or something.
**Something something Freud something something penis. Actually, I wish my memory was a bit better, because I swear it isn't too particularly hard to find a movie about someone finding a gun and deciding to mosey around the city with it. Instead, I keep wondering why I haven't watched Gun Crazy.
[*] Bosco was a Tony Award winning actor for 1989, while Fletcher, well, you know her Academy Award-winning role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but for me, her performances as Kai Winn on the massively underrated Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was probably just as cool.
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