"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Blue Steel

This is a suspense thriller from Kathryn Bigelow, the director of POINT BREAK and NEAR DARK, and one of the few women directors to get much of a chance in these types of movies. This one stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a just-graduated cop who, on her first ever patrol, has to shoot a guy holding up a grocery store.

Now first of all I gotta ask – why are there so many grocery store robberies in these movies? A reader named Jared pointed it out too because I recently reviewed STONE COLD and COBRA, both of which open with the hero going in to foil a grocery store robbery/shootout. Now this one too (and the last book I read, SIDESWIPE by Charles Willeford, also revolves around a grocery store robbery/shootout, although it’s at the end instead of the beginning, because it’s literature). The result here is the exact opposite of those other movies though: instead of a rebel cop who plays by his own rules she’s a straightlaced rookie who tries to do it by the book. Instead of having no consequences the incident could end her career. Talk about a double standard.

Anyway, I don’t remember a wave of grocery store shootouts in the ’80s or early ’90s, but apparently that fear was in the air.

Blue SteelI also gotta point out that when you got Tom Sizemore and Ron Silver both in the same grocery store at the same time, you KNOW you got a fuckin problem. You can’t trust either one of these assholes separately, but together? Jesus Jamie Lee, better get your blue steel ready.

The story unfolds brilliantly because it takes its time telling you what’s going on. (I’m gonna give some of it away though, they never foresaw that would happen, suckers). Jamie has to shoot Sizemore. Silver is one of the witnesses, cowering on the ground. Sizemore’s gun lands next to him and he stares at it, and eventually takes it when nobody’s looking.

So now Jamie’s in deep shit because there’s no gun and people think she fucked up by unloading her blue steel into the motherfucker. Silver goes home with the gun and turns out to be exactly who you would expect him to be, some rich asshole Wall Street trader Ron Silver type in a suit. So you’re wondering what is the deal? He’s in on it with Sizemore and covering up for him, or what?

But it turns out he’s not in on it with the dead Sizemore, he’s just a weirdo who wanted to keep the gun from a crime scene. He carves something into his bullets and then starts carrying the gun around and eventually goes Son of Sam on a random stranger on the street.

Then there’s a storm and he and Jamie happen to end up sharing a cab, they get caught in traffic and he convinces her to go to dinner with him and they’re falling for each other and you’re thinking, well, this is a pretty far-fetched coincidence.

But then you realize it’s not a coincidence when the police show Jamie what they found at the murder scene: a bullet casing with her name carved into it.

So homicide detective Clancy Brown (with some fancy curly hair) promotes her to detective-in-name-only and becomes her partner so he can use her as bait to catch whoever is stalking her. But we know it’s fuckin Ron Silver. So the movie is about how she has to figure out her new boyfriend is Ron Silver and introduce him to the magic of blue steel.

Bigelow does a great job building tension starting with the cool opening credits sequence which takes place inside Jamie’s 38 Special. You see a bullet inserted in the gun from the point of view of the barrel! The score is by Brad Fiedel (guy who did TERMINATOR and TERMINATOR 2) and it’s perfect, starting mostly just as simple, dread-inducing tones and by the end credits building into some kind of creepy avant garde guitar jam.

The best thing about the movie though is the villain, because you REALLY gotta hate this asshole. Ron Silver is of course a great method actor, in recent years he came out as a strong anti-anti-war voice on TV as a way of more fully inhabiting his typical roles as horrible, unlikable pricks in suits and ties. Here he is like the o.g. American Psycho, a yuppie who can seem charming to a naive rookie female cop but also hears voices and ends up naked in her apartment growling and trying to bite her. To prepare for the role I assume but cannot prove that he really stripped naked in the middle of Central Park and grunted animalistically as he rubbed the blood of a dead hooker all over his chest, a ritual later recreated in the movie. This is the type of shit that really goes on on Wall Street, in my opinion.

One criticism. Although Jamie Lee Curtis does a great job as a vulnerable, troubled woman who comes through in the end, it’s kind of too bad this rare strong woman director has to put such an emphasis on the vulnerable side of her heroine. First she falls for this chump (I mean for God’s sake, Jamie, it’s Ron Silver! Are you blind? You don’t date Ron Silver!) and then within a couple days she’s already falling for Clancy Brown. And right after her best friend has been murdered she’s fucking ol’ Clancy. And she hasn’t even noticed that Ron Silver is in the apartment. You gotta check for these things.

In fact, they treat the idea of a woman being a cop as kind of a weird thing, she constantly has to explain herself, and what ends up happening to her almost makes it seem like she’s wrong, that she shouldn’t be a a cop. In most cop movies the leads are men, and at no point does it occur to anybody that they have to explain why they are a cop, unless they throw in some line about their dad was a cop or their uncle was killed in a liquor store robbery. BLUE STEEL gets more into the background of the character, so we see that her dad is abusive to her mom and she has trouble dating because people are afraid of cops, and that sort of thing. So I guess you could say it makes her less of an action hero, but it also makes her more of a character, so it work. It’s a pretty good thriller.

note: I checked up on Kathryn Bigelow’s current whereabouts. Apparently this is a link to a commercial/short she did with Uma Thurman in ’07, but I can’t vouch for it because the damn thing doesn’t work on my computer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Action, Crime, Drama, Reviews, Thriller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

10 Responses to “Blue Steel”

  1. I agree with you that this was mostly a well-directed decent actioneer/thriller. But then that ending, that gun fight on the street above the subway, becomes all epic and shit, making BLUE STEEL a winner here.

    Especially when Silver runs out of bullets. We think Curtis is going to then cuff him…instead she unloads a whole clip on him without that much provocation. Shes like “fuck this” and BANG.

  2. And now i know what Vern thinks of BLUE STEEL.

  3. I just got through watching this movie and yeah, it’s great

  4. “[W]hat ends up happening to her almost makes it seem like she’s wrong, that she shouldn’t be a cop.”

    I would agree with that. She shouldn’t be a cop. Because she’s terrible at it. She’s the worst cop I’ve ever seen in my life. Right from the beginning, when she goes into a hostage situation without calling for backup, even though all she had to do was tell the guy at the store to call the cops or, I don’t know, take a few seconds to get her partner out of the bathroom, everything she does is reckless and retarded. This guy magically appears out the blue and sweeps her off her feet, and she’s not suspicious even though the cops ask her about any boyfriends she might have because, hey, he works on Wall Street, which the movie treats like a license to kill. Then he kind of but not really confesses, which is just hearsay and not admissible, and instead of launching an investigation, putting him under surveillance, seeing if anybody in the area could put him in the vicinity of the murders (you know, like a cop would do), she just pulls a gun on him in his own apartment and arrests him without a scrap of evidence. There goes any hope you had of building a case against him. Which would have been fairly easy, since he lives in a building that has a doorman and elevator operator who know him by name, so it would be simple to ascertain whether or not he was out and about at the time of the murders. But Jamie Lee has no time for any actual police work. Then the guy blows away her best friend, so you’d think she’d warn her parents about the crazy bearded guy in the fancy suit who’s killing the people in her life. But no, he gets invited right into her parents’ house because she never mentioned that she’s working on this little case about a psychopath who’s obsessed with her. Then she’s nearly got the bastard in the park when he’s rooting around in the dirt, looking for his gun. All she had to do is wait for him to find it and boom, case closed. Nope, she’s gotta interrupt him so she can make another pointless tough guy speech. Then she handcuffs her own partner and nearly gets him killed. Then her big showdown happens because she knocks out one of her fellow policemen so she can execute her big plan, which is that she’ll walk down the street and hope he takes a pop at her with innocent bystanders all over the place.

    This is a deeply stupid movie, and not in a fun way. It is absolutely infuriating, and a waste of some excellent mega-acting by Silver. Watching all of this idiocy pile up in scene after scene made me realize that the only Bigelow movie I like all the way through is POINT BREAK. NEAR DARK has that bullshit part where a blood transfusion cures vampirism, STRANGE DAYS pretty much falls apart at the end, and HURT LOCKER has that whole unbelievable subplot that nobody ever talks about where Renner sneaks offbase to find some token adorable Iraqi kid. (I haven’t seen ZERO DARK THIRTY, but Mouth’s epic takedown makes me think it probably has a similarly loose grasp on reasonable plotting.) Is there another filmmaker whose work so consistently veers between brilliant and brain-dead within the same movie, or even the same scene? At least POINT BREAK has them both happening at the same time.

  5. In the office, with nothing but friendlies, no Sizemores or Silver monsters, she pulls her gun and points it at the cop 2 feet away
    (I think she even had to back up a little in order to do her whole full-double-arm-extension thing.)
    who’s proving the point of her unreliable sight by pulling out a comb and getting her to draw, shaking with suspicion.

    Maybe they were right about her only lasting 48 hours as a cop.

    There’s not much wrong with the plotting of 0DARK30 as a fictional film based on some real events. Maya is an interesting character in an interesting world. Everyone else likes it; you should see it.

  6. Eh, one of these days. HURT LOCKER didn’t really do much for me so I’m not as fired up about Respectable Bigelow as everyone else seems to be.

    Honestly, I’d have given the Oscar to her ex.

  7. […] HURT LOCKER, has permanently replaced Kathryn Bigelow, awesome director of POINT BREAK and BLUE STEEL. That’s okay, they’re both very good at what they do. DETROIT follows ZERO DARK THIRTY as […]

  8. […] theater showing THE STORY OF RUTH. Her next door neighbor and best friend Giles (Richard Jenkins, BLUE STEEL) is a gay painter of magazine advertisements who lives with a bunch of cats. In the opening scene, […]

  9. Blue Steel survives a 2018 rewatch, as there’s enough meatiness to chew on to go along with the Flashdance/Tony Scott-esque style that we’ll probably never see from Kathryn Bigelow again. The film has interesting things to say about being a woman in a man’s world and having nobody ever take your word for anything (even if the theme is never specifically stated out loud). It even has a little bit to say about class, with the Pretty Woman-esque romance between Curtis and Silver and the fact that the cops immediately rule Silver out as the killer because of his Wall Street job. Oh, and Curtis is incredible – tough and funny and likable, the perfect foil for Silver at his most MEGA.

    So it’s too bad the script takes what would normally be a 3rd act development (Curtis finds out Silver is the killer) and moves it to halfway point. There’s nothing wrong with subverting expectations, but if you’re going to pull off a stunt like that you should have something better planned for the rest of the film than a Hitcher remake where characters suddenly stop acting like themselves and dream-logic starts popping up to smooth over giant plot holes. What started out as fresh and exciting starts to grow a little repetitive and montonous, before recovering with one hell of an ending. As Curtis goes rogue and steals/reclaims her police uniform that she so proudly wore over the opening credits, and she wanders aimlessly downtown from night to daytime, hoping to draw Silver out, the movie gets back on track with a great final showdown.

    *Side note: Recently heard a podcast about the whole Eric Red vehicular manslaughter/murder thing that I never heard about, and totally forgot he wrote this until yesterday. I was thinking “well, at least this one doesn’t have anyone hit by a car in it” and then of course that happens at the end and I started getting a little uncomfortable about the whole thing (especially if you take Silver’s “white collar guy gets his kicks from murdering” character to be a stand-in for Red himself).

  10. I’ll add more later but I’m with Mr M, this movie stinks. If i had a gun pointed at me for 5 mins like the clerk and everybody else in the store did I’m not going to confuse it with a knife or anything else. Plus it’s 1990 not 1970, Law and Order started so clearly surveillance cameras surely existed right?

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