Blue Steel

Kathryn Bigelow's 1990 film, Blue Steel, is an example of a movie that is competently directed--the numerous actions scenes are well shot and edited. But the story is so preposterous that it is completely undermined. As the characters did increasingly stupid things, I got more and more angry.

Jamie Lee Curtis stars as a rookie cop. On her first day (oh, the cliche of the cop being literally baptized by fire on their initial shift!) she foils a grocery store robbery by shooting and killing the suspect. A witness (Ron Silver) grabs the robber's gun and somehow eludes the police, and Curtis is suspended for using excessive force. Immediately my bullshit detector went crazy--how did Silver manage to get out of the store without anyone noticing, especially with a gun?

Possessing the gun makes Silver go crazy--it's sort of like Gollum's ring. He becomes obsessed with Curtis, and etches her character's names on bullets he uses to kill people. Silver goes way over the top, hearing voices and wallowing in a dead prostitute's blood. He contrives to meet Curtis and they date, but eventually he confesses to her, but when she arrests him his lawyer gets him out.

Bigelow, who co-wrote the script with Eric Red, seems to have no knowledge of how policemen actually work. A detective (nicely played by Clancy Brown), asks Curtis who she knows that might be behind this. She says she only knows her parents and one friend, which seems unlikely, given that she lives in New York City. When she starts dating Silver Brown knows it, but doesn't seem to think that tailing Silver might prove instructive. Then, when they tail him to Central Park where he has buried the gun, Curtis takes complete leave of her senses and handcuffs Brown to the steering wheel. I suppose it's because she wanted to prove she could do it all by herself, but it's such a dumb fucking thing to that it was all I could do to keep watching.

Roger Ebert has written about the "idiot plot," where a story would come to a halt if the characters weren't idiots. This is even worse, because the characters are cops, who are supposedly trained. In fact, the film opens with Curtis during training, when she fucks up. I suppose the lesson here is that the NYPD should fire her ass immediately.