User Reviews

This is a movie about guns, two-handed combat positions, reloading, spent cartridges, gore, .44 magnums, shooting deaths in slow motion, and all that.

If you liked, say, "Magnum Force," you'll love this one.

There is one small problem with this slickly made cop thriller, though, and that is that it makes no sense whatever. The implausibility is apparent from the first action scene onward. Jamie Lee Curtis is a rookie cop who stumbles onto a hold up in a supermarket. Curtis, by the way, although she looks just fine in every other regard, is one of those people like Clint Eastwood that caps simply don't sit comfortably on, but never mind. Back to the hold up. The perp has got the few customers lying face down on the floor and shivering with fear. The perp is ordering the checkout man to give him the cash while Curtis, gun drawn, sneaks up behind him. She announces her presence and tells him to "put the gun down," three times, very clearly. She has a bead on him. So what does the perp do? He smirks, says something like, "I ain't here to argue with you, B****!" and swings his gun towards her. She turns into a human firing squad and blasts him through the window. His gun clatters unnoticed to the floor and Ron Silver, one of the customers, surreptitiously pockets it and leaves. Well, fellas and girls, the perp's gun is not found at the scene of the shooting. Furthermore, NOBODY, not the shivering customers, not the counterman, has even SEEN the perp's gun. It is automatically assumed by all of her male superiors at the department that she hysterically killed an unarmed man. (Maybe he was soliciting for Friends of the Earth.) And we have the obligatory scene in which the put-upon and misunderstood cop must turn over his or her badge and gun to his or her boss.

I won't go on with further examples. These impossibilities are only there to advance the plot, and, trust me, the plot needs advancing. First of all, I don't believe Ron Silver as a gun-loving psychotic. I would believe Ron Silver as a Jewish lawyer, yes, preferably Allan Dershowitz, but not an escapee from the Englewood Cliffs Home for Fetishists. If the guy could bring together all the voices in his head he could form a light opera company. Not that Silver does a bad job. When he pays an unannounced visit to Curtis's parents his eyes seem to glow with a rich hint of lunacy. Curtis isn't bad either, possibly because we already know that she doesn't take herself too seriously as an actress. She is brutally but engagingly self aware. Clancy Brown begins as a nudnik homicide detective who ridicules Curtis but then comes to love her, or at least to like her enough to bed her.

Well, I can't help myself. I'm going to mention another impossibility. Curtis is hospitalized and wants desperately to get out. She lures another cop, a beefy one, into her room, clips him on the jaw and cold cocks him. Wait -- that's not the implausibility I'm getting at. She then steals the cop's uniform and it fits her rather nicely. We would all, I think, like to know more about the cop who lost his uniform. For instance, why is he wearing a shirt with bust darts? But let that go too. We follow Curtis as she leaves the hospital without anyone knowing about it. She walks through the city streets. (This is New York we're talking about.) She walks down into the subway and we realize that Silver is following about twenty feet behind her. How did he get there? How could he know she would sneak out of the hospital? In police drag? Never mind. That's not the implausibility I was getting at either. THIS is that implausibility -- she has never looked behind her and yet, in the subway, at the moment Silver raises his gun to shoot her in the back, she whirls about and exchanges shots with him. This amounts to ESP on Curtis's part and I suggest her brain would make a neat addition along with Paul Broca's to La Musee de l'Homme in Paris.

The photography is dazzling, in many ways the best part of the film, although too much use is made of neon blue in night shots. Manhattan looks glorious from a helicopter at night, possibly because you can't see any people from there, just glittering skyscrapers.

I wish Curtis would not have shot the no-longer dangerous Silver at the end.

I mean, the poor guy had already taken three or four bullets in the movie -- par for the course for a crime thriller, true, but still undoubtedly painful. And he's now out of bullets. And furthermore he is as nutty as a fruitcake, babbling on about "seeing the radiance," and "you were my brilliance," and screaming at the voices that torment him. I realize everyone is panting to see this maniac plugged full of mortal holes but, after all, he belongs in a psychiatric hospital not a morgue.

Well, who cares? Not Kathryn Bigelow and her co-writer. This is a commercial piece and not designed to do much more than grab you by the lapels and shake you. It does that okay. It would have been nice, though, if the director, having lingered over such testosterone-rich concepts as death by gunshot, had seen fit to linger a bit longer over Jamie Lee Curtis as she rolls nude from her bed after being savaged by Silver. I guess you have to be philosophical about these things.

Rookie cop Megan, while foiling a robbery, attracts the attention of nutjob Eugene Hunt who proceeds to seriously mess up her life.

Somehow I managed not to see this 1989 movie until 2013, and boy did I miss a corker! Superficially this would appear to be a decent action/psychological thriller, and it is certainly blessed with good performances, but it also saddled with a script where every scene appears to be written by someone who only has the vaguest idea of what has happened up to the start of that scene. To say it is full of plot holes is an understatement.

When you take into account that it was directed and co-written by Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, you have a real puzzle because the script is what is at fault here.

Having said that, there is something enjoyable in a slickly made thriller with a script which is as dumb as a brick.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays officer Megan Turner, a rookie cop who kills an armed robber her first day on the job. During the commotion, one of the witnesses, Eugene Hunt, a Wall St. gold trader played by Ron Silver, snatches the robber's gun and, faster than you can say "junk bonds", turns into a psychopathic serial killer with an obsessive fixation on both the gun and Turner.

The total absence of intelligence in this movie makes it painful to watch. Even after Hunt murders her closest friend on her doorstep, Turner continues to spend her evenings at her apartment, never bothering to so much as check the place out for intruders. So it comes as little shock when Hunt is there waiting for her one night.

No one else in the movie manages to demonstrate an IQ higher than their age, either: a supermarket clerk, after being threatened by a gun-wielding maniac for five long, tedious minutes, replete with threats to "blow him away", later, under police questioning, says that the weapon might have been a knife. The only reason for such staggering stupidity is that it was necessary to force an unwilling script kicking and screaming down an unlikely plot-line.

So stay away from this one, folks. It's not even bad enough to be funny.

It's impossible to describe this absolute disaster of a movie without providing spoilers. However,let me first say that all the production elements (cinematography, sound, editing, costuming, makeup, stunts, effects,etc.) are first rate, Curtis and Silver turn in good performances and Kathryn Bigelow keeps things moving (which is more than she did in the superior "Point Break"). However, the plot elements are stupid. For example:

WARNING: SPOILERS

1. A rookie would fail to call for backup when she sees the robbery in the grocery store. 2. None of the witnesses remember seeing the robber's gun. 3. The store would not have security cameras. 4. Ron Silver could take a weapon as large as a 44 and leave the crime scene without being detected.

It gets worse: 5. The police task force investigating a "Son of Sam" type serial killer would consist of just two detectives, one a rookie. 5. After Curtis first apprehends Silver, homicide would fail to

either order a gunpowder residue test or interrogate Silver to hear his alibi. 6. After Silver kills Pena, homicide would again fail to order a gunpowder test and forensics wouldn't search for clues at the crime scene which would pin it to Silver. 7. After Silver's lawyer files a restraint order against Curtis, Curtis would not file a counter order against Silver. 8. When Curtis finds Silver at her parent's house, she wouldn't have taken Silver into custody for stalking. 9. When Curtis finds Silver searching for his hidden gun in the woods, Homicide wouldn't have a search team looking for the weapon. 10. After Silver's attempts on Curtis and her partner, they would not have sweeped her apartment before retiring to make love. 11. Curtis shows she a crack shot, both against a target and the robber. Yet she misses Silver repeatedly when Silver is standing in the open.

What a mess and a waste of Curtis.

Found the disc in an old box and decided to watch this 30 year old movie. And was disappointed. Very good actors! But the storyline is awful.

Psychotic murderer seems to have supernatural powers in that he always finds the people he is looking for, gets into their house even though cops are watching it, always manages to surprise his victims in situations where they can't defend themselves, even though they know he is about and are on their guard. No explanation is given as to how he manages these things.

The scene where Jamie Lee handcuffs her partner to the steering wheel, and of course the killer appears just there and then, is such an obvious silly improbability that you can see it coming from a mile away. Predictability is a great weakness in the whole movie. And that is exactly what we don't want in a thriller.

Police bosses and lawyers are unbelievably stupid and unprofessional. Like when the killer is interviewed just after he has shot someone, there is no search for gunpowder residue on his clothes and hands. Just because he's a stock broker, they assume he could not have done it. And the cops are ridiculously easily intimidated by the mouthy lawyer. When Jamie Lee finds him digging for his gun in Central Park, they make no effort to find the gun they know will be somewhere in the vicinity.

Don't remember this as a particularöy bad movie from when I first watched it like 25 years ago. Possibly I'm getting cranky...

Really, really REALLY stupid. (Really).

I like the idea of a thriller with a female cop. Certainly Silence of the Lambs proved this can be an interesting lead character; in this case Curtis plays a straight rookie cop, not a detective.

Possible Spoilers:

On one of her very first assignments she stops a violent robber at a grocer store; she winds up having to shoot him; who should be shopping in the same store but Ron Silver, a nervous, on-the-edge stock broker. This scene puts him over the edge, for some reason, and he winds up stealing the robber's gun. Naturally, Curtis is in hot water when she can't prove to her superiors that the man she killed was armed. Silver proceeds to kill people at random, hoping Curtis will investigate; he has become fixated on her, and this is his bizarre way of starting a "relationship." He also introduces himself in the normal way, and they proceed to date, with Curtis never suspecting he's the psycho killer she is pursuing. Then the movie takes a veer toward the disgusting, gratuitous, and plain silly. Silver starts hearing voices talking to him in his head; apparently an old illness reappearing (killing people does that, I guess.) Soon just killing his victims isn't enough. He has to rub his face in their blood. Curtis begins to suspect him (can you say "Duuuhhhhhhh....?"), and they play a cat and mouse game that Hitchcock would envy (not.) At this point the only thing to hold our interest is how stupid it can get. They don't dissappoint. Curtis finally confronts Silver and there is a gun battle. Just how many bullets do these guns fire, anyway? Curtis, having run out of bullets, grabs a car and runs Silver over! Like the Terminator, he stands up again. No offence Ron, but you're no Terminator. This scene is hysterical enough to rent the movie for by itself. Finally, I think she shoots him again, since being squashed by a 2,000 pound car doesn't seem to keep a good psycho down. The movie ends soon after.

The premise is good, and I can even buy Ron Silver being the bad guy, but everything else about this movie is silly, silly, silly. Curtis does a very good as the rookie, but she is the only really good thing in this film. The direction isn't even that bad. It's the script, which bizarrely enough, everyone follows. Avoid, unless you see this with at least three other guys and a huge bowl of popcorn. Mystery Science Theater missed a good op with this one. Three out of ten stars.

"Blue Steel" is an action-packed cop drama in which a female police officer is stalked by a violent psychopath who terrorises her and also puts the lives of her family and friends in danger. Her ordeal isn't helped by the lack of support that she receives from her employers or the negative way in which most people respond to her choice of career.

Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a New York City cop who, on her first night in the job, shoots and kills a gunman who was holding up a supermarket. When the robber's gun falls to the floor, one of the customers, a commodities broker called Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), picks it up and leaves. Shortly after the incident, Megan is suspended from duty because the absence of a weapon suggests that she may have panicked and killed an unarmed man.

Soon, a number of dead bodies are found on the streets of the city and it becomes evident that they are all victims of a serial killer who's shooting people at random with bullets which have Megan's name inscribed on them. At this point, homicide detective Nick Martin (Clancy Brown) arranges for Megan to be reinstated in the hope that she can help him to catch the killer.

The manipulative Eugene Hunt arranges to meet Megan and starts courting her and soon she starts to fall for him. His obsession with her was sparked by her actions on the night of the shooting and it takes a little time before Megan realises that he's seriously disturbed and very dangerous. The danger that Megan finds herself in then continues to escalate steadily as every effort she makes to stop his rampage meets with the same lack of success.

Megan Turner's character is the main focus of this film and she's shown to be someone who, as a child, was made to feel angry and powerless because she grew up in a home where her mother was regularly beaten by her father. Her chosen career was attractive to her because it enabled her to exercise power over others and prevent herself from becoming a victim like her mother. Megan's anger, however, is ever present and so when she's asked why she chose to become a police officer, she replies in a semi-humorous way "I like to slam people's heads against walls". This remark is revealing because it's not the type of comment that any well-adjusted person would make and it highlights just how brittle a personality she is.

Jamie Lee Curtis captures her character's mixture of toughness, determination and fear perfectly and Ron Silver makes a very strong impression as the unhinged villain who seems completely unstoppable.

"Blue Steel" is stylishly made and remains engaging throughout despite the fact that it requires a little too much suspension of disbelief at various junctures in order to enjoy it fully.

There have always been so few female directors working in mainstream cinema, I always try to see as many of their films as I can. In this case it was a film by Kathryn Bigelow, 1989's cop thriller 'Blue Steel.'

Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop who guns down a robber in a grocery store hold-up. Unbeknownst to her, a stockbroker, played by Ron Silver, picks up the crooks gun. Soon he's obsessed with Curtis and out in the streets at night murdering random people. He tracks her down, stalks her, even takes her to dinner. When Curtis finds out that he's the madman responsible for the murders plaguing the city, they both enter into a deadly game of cat and mouse.

I've always found Kathryn Bigelow interesting. Unlike acclaimed female directors like Jane Campion and Mira Nair, Bigelow's films are aggressive, even masculine. Some of her credits include 'Near Dark,' 'Point Break,' 'Strange Days,' and this years critical hit 'The Hurt Locker.' Watching any of these films you'd have no idea they had a female behind the camera. And that's why I like her so much. She breaks the mold of what kind of pictures female directors 'should' make.

So I was looking forward to sitting down and enjoying 'Blue Steel.' Sadly, I really didn't. The problem isn't the acting or directing, it's the script. The first half of the film is tight and suspenseful, but the second half is full of clichés and plot holes. The cinematography however, is pretty good, and sort of distracts you from the dull proceedings. It's reminiscent of a Ridley Scott film from the 80's.

All in all, 'Blue Steel' isn't terrible, it's just not very believable or exciting. There was a great movie that could have been made here, but because of the lousy script, we got a mediocre one.