Blue Steel - A Helluva First Week On The Job

Jan

22

Blue Steel - A Helluva First Week On The Job

≡ Category: Action, Movie Reviews By Country, Recommended, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Year: 1989
Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Blue Steel is entertaining enough while it lasts — it holds your attention — but it’s a bit of a disappointment coming from a major action stylist like Kathryn Bigelow, with Blue Steel sandwiched chronologically in her oevre between two excellent films, Near Dark and Point Break.

Blue Steel is so stylized and stripped down, it’s almost like an action koan.

Fresh out of the police academy, officer Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) foils a supermarket robbery. One of the customers who happened to be in the store at the time, Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) forms an extremely unhealthy emotional attachment to Megan and starts blowing aware random civilians with the gun he stole from the perp. It’s up to Megan to catch him. That’s pretty much it.

The action scenes have the power and immediacy that we’ve come to expect from Kathryn Bigelow, but there’s something missing. The story is full of melodramatic, borderline absurd events, so you can’t really take Blue Steel seriously as a drama, and yet Bigelow, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Red, plays down the societal underpinnings of the story that could have made for a very rich experience.

They’re there in embryonic form. You see, Eugene is a commodities trader. We see him on the floor of the New York Stock Market, and it’s a madhouse, everyone screaming for eight hours straight, the floor littered with refuse after the shift, like an evil inversion of Woodstock. The implication is there. Eugene gets off on the power of losing and winning fortunes in minutes. The only thing that could be more of a power trip is taking human life. Eugene himself alludes to how unhealthy the commodities trade is on a psychic level, especially if you’re dealing with gold futures, because you’re basically rooting for the rest of the world to go to hell.

The whole capitalistic, yuppie, power trip, it’s-all-about-me mindset could have been the subtext for the whole movie, and could have been explored ruthlessly. This would have anchored the action scenes and given them a context. But, unaccountably, the screenwriters back off and refuse to fully engage with the material.

To be fair, Bigelow does a good job of presenting Megan’s dilemma as the ultimate workplace and personal nightmare combined, but it’s barely enough. Other than that, all we have is some slickly choreographed gun violence. I expect more than that from a great director like Kathryn Bigelow.