← Back to Reviews
 

Blue Steel


#455 - Blue Steel
Kathryn Bigelow, 1989



When a rookie cop shoots an armed robber, a bystander acquires the robber's gun and becomes obsessed with violence.

Blue Steel marks the fifth Kathryn Bigelow film I've seen and it marks the first film of hers that I have genuinely disliked. Sandwiched between a pair of cult classics, 1987's vampire neo-Western Near Dark and 1991's extreme-sports caper flick Point Break, it is ultimately a rather disappointing cop movie that was co-written by Bigelow and her Near Dark collaborator Eric Red. Granted, it does offer a somewhat unusual premise in having a female NYPD rookie (Jamie Lee Curtis) get caught up in a convenience store robbery during her first day on the job. It results in her shooting the perp, but the perp's gun goes missing when a yuppie bystander (Ron Silver) picks it up and, inspired by the events he's just witnessed, begins his own gradual descent into wanton violence. Meanwhile, Curtis must go through some serious struggles as her superiors question her use of deadly force on a supposedly armed robber when no gun was recovered from the scene...

I give Blue Steel some credit for doing something slightly different with its takes on both protagonist and antagonist. Curtis's gender does understandably draw some derisive comments from her male superiors and her partner (Clancy Brown, who becomes the subject of one especially forced romantic sub-plot), plus it adds a somewhat interesting spin to her relationship with her parents (Louise Fletcher and Philip Bosco), especially when it comes to her abusive father. Silver, on the other hand, makes for a somewhat interesting villain due to his being a rather ordinary Wall Street type whose growing obsession with mindless violence as a release from his everyday drudgery feels like an antedecent to characters like American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. Of course, this is about all the depth there is to these characters before they are both plunged into a excruciatingly standard cat-and-mouse game that's given only the slightest of variations on the generic Hollywood cop movie formula. Other films have shown Bigelow to be a reasonably talented filmmaker who has worked with some intriguing high concepts, but here that talent just gets wasted on a series of sequences that fluctuate between slow-motion shoot-outs and slasher-like suspense. As a result, Blue Steel feels like a horribly dated and inconsequential piece of work that takes a somewhat interesting premise and yet doesn't make a sufficiently interesting film out of it, which is very disappointing considering what the director and her collaborators have otherwise been capable of doing.