Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by Eric Red and Kathryn Bigelow
In pitting cops and Wall Street finance bros against each other in Blue Steel, Kathryn Bigelow asks for sympathy for those least likely to get it, try as she might by casting a Jamie Lee Curtis, vulnerable but intrepid, as the rookie cop who becomes the murderous obsession of a haunted stockbroker. Nice try, Kathryn.
Because as stunning a filmmaker Bigelow can be, Blue Steel is a letdown. A sleek machine of a film, it offers A-game handiwork, but runny eggs for brains and over-the-top performances. It’s a monster movie in disguise, and would work if it was camp. Alas, Blue Steel takes itself too seriously for that.
Curtis plays Megan Turner, a baby cop on the force. Bigelow produces what can rightfully be called copaganda to introduce her, showing the minute details of Megan putting on her dress uniform, becoming the complete package of law and order, whereafter she joins her fellow graduates. The montage of graduation, with its rows and rows of uniforms, is an impressive sight. Bigelow then cuts to informal portraits of the new police officers as they pose with their family, because these shiny crime fighters are still people, you know. Respect them like demigods, forgive them like the fallible people they are.
Case in point: Officer Turner is out on her first shift, and while her veteran partner heads to the bathroom, she spots a robbery in a supermarket across the street. A breathless approach ends with her gunning down the perp, firing her revolver until it goes click. Baptism by (gun)fire for the rookie, but instead of praise, she’s under scrutiny. The robber’s revolver isn’t found on the scene, and eyewitness accounts don’t bear her out. Behind closed doors, it gets chalked up to “unauthorized use of deadly force” – dang!
That means paid vacay for Megan, but soon New Yorkers are shot in the street by a gun matching the one used by the robber, and worse yet, the bullet casings have her name etched into them… who could be so obsessed with a woman capable of deadly violence?
What follows is an increasingly delirious fever dream where Megan’s tormented by a stalking killer. Ron Silver plays Eugene Hunt, the stockbroker who unearths a violent streak thanks to Megan, and while Silver has the smoldering intensity that would lead him to be cast in a role like this, he cannot bring to bear the awful writing that explains his character, which suddenly is religiously motivated one minute, and downgraded to run-of-the-mill psychopathic behavior next. In Silver’s defense, no one could believably be Eugene Hunt.
Curtis does well enough within the confines of the script, and she also knows how to kick ass and get her ass kicked. She does both in Blue Steel, and what she lacks in physique she makes up for in attitude. Both Curtis and Silver must make do with what the script gives them, but sometimes actors transcend the weak material they’re given.
Tom Sizemore shows up for a few minutes as the grocery store robber, and he does more with that than Silver and Curtis do combined. You somehow feel more for this lunatic waving a hand cannon in a teenage cashier’s face than the cop tasked with taking him down. Sizemore’s ability to portray haunted tough guys was only matched by James Gandolfini. Both are gone too soon.
Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red want Blue Steel to be shocking, but find their eardrum-blasting shootouts insufficient. They juice their stats with nonsensical plot development that turn it into an unbelievable mess held together by their gall. It all makes Blue Steel feel like a good idea that wasn’t developed past the first 10 minutes, only Bigelow got the money to make the damn thing without anyone asking for the script to be tightened up a bit.
They offer up Silver like a sacrificial lamb, asking him to whip himself into a frenzy to play Eugene, hoping to overpower common sense as this villain terrorizes an entire city unburdened by even the smidgen of logic action films must abide by.
So Blue Steel has no brains, but it does have brawn. The NYPD recruitment video that opens Bigelow’s movie is just the overture to a movie that looks, sounds, and feels great to watch. Its framing, use of color, composition all feels like textbook moviemaking with a touch of genius, so whether it’s a grocery store shootout, or simply Megan walking down a nighttime street with smoke billowing around her, it’s arresting. By modern standards, she’s a little too self-indulgent when she shoots her action scenes, but when the spectacle is this good, more is more, and it’s desired.
You come to believe Blue Steel leaves a lot on the table, especially because its opening credits sequence is an all-time great. It’s an intense close-up of a weapon so nearsighted it makes abstract art of the object at hand, reducing it to lines, grooves, and textures that slowly form a whole. It’s a perfect setup for a movie that circles the idea of sexual obsession rooted in a gun’s deadly power, but like all of Blue Steel, this promising element isn’t pursued with any rigor and it all goes down the drain.
Bigelow’s movie is a fancy gunslinger that ultimately dies ingloriously due to self-inflicted wounds that some more time spent behind a typewriter might’ve avoided. Its weak script and two-bit performances saps it of all its power, leaving it a muddled experience only held somewhat aloft by its production value.
Mikkel Frederiksen 