Alas. This series' three films directed by Kathryn Bigelow started with a whimper, and also ended with one -- though it seems quite misplaced to describe any of Blue Steel's histrionics as a "whimper."
Her first film The Loveless also disappointed me, so her portion of this series was only salvaged by Near Dark, which I loved and gave four stars on Letterboxd.
Jane Campion isn't doing a huge amount better, though my feelings on her first two films were more like lukewarmth. Whereas my star rating for Blue Steel just kept on dropping and dropping throughout the film's running time, until it was about as low as it could go.
To give you some sense of why I disliked this film so much I will have to spoil it. (The bold and italics are meant to indicate that this is your spoiler warning.) The film is 33 years old so I suspect you will have decided long ago whether you planned to see it. If you still plan to, you can stop reading this now.
Much of my disappointment has to do with mistaken expectations when coming in -- expectations that seem even more mistaken given what I've been able to gather from the tenor of Bigelow's other films, all the rest of which I had now seen.
Perhaps only because the promotional materials for the movie all show Jamie Lee Curtis in her beat cop uniform, I was under the impression that this was some sort of realistic look at a female police officer -- that still seeming something of an anachronism as late as 1990, when this film was made -- and how she cuts her teeth on the force. I expected sexism to play a role (it only plays a very small one) and I imagined it to be a lot more like a procedural.
No, this is a classic, and very bad, example of that inescapable 1990s thriller, the cat-and-mouse game between a cop and a killer and how the killer gets inside the cop's head.
Yawn.
These can be done well. I'm sure I liked a number of these movies back in the 1990s. This one is not done well.
We are introduced to Curtis' Megan Turner as an academy hopeful with an earnest desire to work as a police officer. She seems to be a totally by-the-book type who just wants to serve the people and do honor to the badge.
But on her very first shift -- almost as much of a cliche as the very last shift -- she shoots dead a man trying to rob a grocery store. (Tom Sizemore, whom Bigelow would use again, in bigger roles, in Point Break and Strange Days.)
Ordinarily, this first day on the job would just be considered very bad luck and would not, should not, define Officer Turner's upcoming actions in her chosen career. Clearly they need to investigate the shooting, but witnesses would corroborate her story that she told the man to drop his gun multiple times before opening fire, and only did so when he turned the gun on her.
Unfortunately, she immediately loses all credibility by starting to act incredibly erratically, beyond the standard ways common to a rogue cop who has to break the rules to prove what he or she knows to be true but what no one else can see.
She tries to arrest someone while on desk duty -- or is it actual suspension? -- with a gun she shouldn't have. She handcuffs the internal affairs officer on her case to the steering wheel of his car so she can follow a hunch to try to catch the man who is stalking her. (And nearly gets him killed, for the first of two times.) When she's in the hospital as a patient, she punches out another officer so she can steal his uniform -- for reasons that are totally unclear beyond what seems like Bigelow's interest in staging the final shootout with Turner in her beat cop clothes.
Adding to the ridiculousness, even though it has been established that she shot Sizemore on her first day as a beat cop, she is treated throughout like a veteran, offered benefits of the doubt only accorded to those who have logged countless hours and cases, as well as given their level of access to case files and to higher ups in the NYPD, including, if I'm not mistaken, the police commissioner himself (Kevin Dunn). We're talking about a woman fresh out of cadet school who shot someone five times on the first day of the job! She would be granted exactly zero benefits of the doubt, especially because -- the film notes but does not follow through on -- she's a woman. (Really, the fact that Blue Steel was not more about her gender is a major disappointment that I cannot overstate. Bigelow could have really pushed this and she just didn't.)
But one of the main reasons she should not be accorded this sort of preferential treatment is because they can't find Sizemore's gun, leading to doubts that it ever actually existed. (The witnesses seem unable to confirm it, which is ridiculous -- they're all on the floor, and they wouldn't be just because a guy was waving around a knife.)
But if she shot Sizemore dead, then his gun would have clattered to the grocery store floor and been collected as evidence, right?
That brings us to the movie's villain, played by Ron Silver, a Wall Street day trader. And boy is he a doozy.
Silver's Eugene Hunt is at the grocery store at the time of the shooting. He also drops to the ground. When Sizemore is shot, his gun does clatter to the ground -- right next to Eugene. Who surreptitiously takes the gun and leaves the scene without staying to provide witness statements.
Why does he do this? Lord knows, but I will try to hazard a guess.
Apparently this Wall Street day trader has always been a psychopath in the waiting and was just looking for someone to drop their gun next to him in order to push him over the top. And if you're expecting this to lead to an exploration of toxic masculinity on Wall Street and for Eugene to be a character in the mold of Patrick Bateman, I'm sorry to disappoint you there too. Bret Easton Ellis didn't write American Psycho until the following year. Who knows, maybe he was inspired by Blue Steel.
So Eugene has this gun and has gone back to work and we don't really know anything more about him just yet. But then he waits outside in the rain for Megan after she's been stripped of her badge and her gun. She doesn't know him from a hole in the ground because he left the scene of her shooting without anyone seeing him. She just thinks he's a kind stranger -- a kind stranger in a fancy suit and a neatly cropped beard -- who offers her a place in his taxi.
He takes her to dinner and takes her on a helicopter ride and seduces her. Why he's interested in her outside of it being one of those dumb conveniences these movies need is initially unclear, and I think still unclear after the film's bogus explanation. But you should know that now that he has a gun, he has decided to start shooting other random people around the city and carving Megan's name onto the bullet casings. I guess to frame her? But that couldn't be -- people don't have personally monogrammed bullets. Just to mess with her I guess.
He's keeping separate the seduction from the cuckoo behavior until one day he decides to spring on her the idea that she might be his soulmate because she also can unflinchingly shoot someone. So I guess when she shot Sizemore it turned him on and he thought he might have found the woman who can be the psychotic other half of his fetishistic desire to shoot people. (Silver, by the way, has some really demented moments that work in isolation, but as a realization of some actual psychological disorder, they're pretty absurd.)
And this is when she starts behaving more and more erratically, though of course she never has anything solid on him -- and her bringing of her hunches to the police brass is particularly ludicrous given she would know she needs evidence. His lawyer (a young Richard Jenkins) makes sure that nothing can stick to him precisely because of this lack of evidence, and even though Eugene and the lawyer are both supposed to be smarmy and acting in bad faith, you kind of agree with the lawyer that's there's nothing she can actually pin on him. Agreeing with this lawyer is not where we should be at this point in the movie.
The characters here are so poorly drawn, their motivations so sketchily established, that their behavior as the movie advances toward its finale just gets more and more ludicrous. To give you an idea of how hopeless things have gotten by the end of the third act, let's fast forward to the moment when Megan is in the hospital and has just punched out the cop to take his clothes. This was instead of taking a sedative to make her sleep after Eugene broke into her apartment and shot the IA agent (Clancy Brown), though somehow not fatally, and injured her enough to send her into the hospital before himself disappearing again -- as he is, as all mysterious killers are, wont to do.
So Megan is back in her blues that she hasn't worn since that very first night, I suppose walking aimlessly in an attempt to find Eugene. She goes down into a subway, and suddenly he's there on the subway platform, aiming a gun at her back. Despite the fact that aiming a gun at somebody's back does not involve any noise -- they don't show the gun's hammer clicking or anything -- she whirls around and fires a shot at him just before he can try to shoot her.
The staging here is particularly peculiar. It does not seem as though Eugene has followed her down into this subway station. The staging suggests he was already in the subway -- he's finally ditched his suit for the clothes of an indigent person -- and she just happened to walk down onto the platform in this particular station, where he already was. What? That doesn't make a bit of sense.
It appears as though Bigelow wanted to have this showdown in the subway so Megan could be knocked off her feet, with her head exposed to an oncoming train, so she could move it out of the way at the last moment. It wasn't worth it.
Their showdown surfaces to street level where they shoot at each other from behind cars and not once, not twice, but at least three times empty their cartridge and then look stupidly at the gun to see why it's no longer shooting bullets, continuing to pull the trigger despite the lack of further emanations from the barrel. Gee, might the gun have run out of bullets? It's the dumb movie version of someone tapping a microphone and saying "Is this thing on?" only it's "Is this gun working like it's supposed to?"
Finally there's a moment where she has him at close range and after a long pregnant pause, she blasts him three times in the chest -- at which point he falls forward. Not backward, but forward.
In a modern movie, Megan would have learned from all her reckless discharging of her weapon and would have placed him under arrest, an indication that maybe she does have a future in the police force and she can put this all behind her. Instead, she drops him dead. (Well, he did kill her friend earlier and tried to kill the IA agent whom she had just slept with, despite the fact that she almost got him killed by handcuffing him to his steering wheel.)
Because you could run the credits without any sort of epilogue back in this era, that's exactly what happens. A dazed Megan is pulled from the front seat of the vehicle where she was sitting when she finally popped a cap in Eugene's ass, the officer who comes across this scenario where she had just shot dead an apparent civilian never wondering for a moment whether she might be the aggressor, some sort of demented person wearing a cop uniform. Indeed, that's pretty much what she is. Indeed, it's not even her own uniform, as she punched out a nice cop who had just offered her a cigarette and whose only crime was being assigned to sit outside her room at the hospital so no one tried to kill her.
I was half expecting an epilogue, though, where we would see the police commissioner draping some kind of medal around her neck for her bravery, or giving her the key to the city. At this point I was so skeptical of the core ethics of the movie that I thought Bigelow might find this completely justified.
I do feel a little bad beating up Blue Steel and Bigelow because of the optics of it; because of the very thing I said I wished this movie had dealt with more. I thought specifically this movie was going to be about a woman's journey on the police force, in an era in which she was scoffed at for choosing this career path and many people didn't think her capable of doing it. It's fine that Bigelow was more interested in making what is effectively an erotic thriller. It's her business if she wants to do that. What worries me is whether I, a male critic and blogger, will be seen as shitting on this work by a female director with a female star, when I'm sure there were so many other terrible movies conforming to this template made at this same time, that were made by and starring men.
But it isn't this same time now, and I expect I'd find many of those movies equally lacking if I watched them in 2023. It's conceivable that I would have found Blue Steel slightly more useful in 1990, but I don't know. It's pretty bad.
Speaking of 1990, there was one thing I noticed about this movie as it related to another movie that came out in 1990. That's Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, which is also set in New York -- and features two of the actors that this film featured. Yes, Elizabeth Pena (Megan's friend whom Eugene shoots and kills) and Matt Craven (a date Megan is fixed up with, who turns up his nose at her career choice) are both also in Jacob's Ladder, which I found strange. Just a coincidence that the two actors were also in a different movie set in New York and made in 1990? Or at least released in 1990?
No, actually! Both movies featured Risa Bramon Garcia and Billy Hopkins as casting directors, as it turns out.
In order to finish the Kathryn Bigelow portion of this series on a more hopeful note, I'll say that Blue Steel does serve a useful purpose if we think of it as a a blue print (so to speak) for Strange Days, which is my favorite Bigelow film and in my top 100 on Flickchart. It seems Bigelow is working out some of the ideas and iconic imagery of that film in this one, and at least by then she has really figured out where she stands on the police and their possibility for corruption. It's a theme she would explore more and more ruthlessly up to and including her most recent feature to date, 2017's Detroit.
It's a bit of a bummer that Bigelow hasn't made -- hasn't gotten to make? -- a film in the six years since then, because one of the reasons I chose her for this series is that when she's on, she's really on. Beyond Strange Days, my favorite of hers by leaps and bounds, we've got other films that worked like gangbusters for others even if they might not have worked to that same extent for me, like Point Break, the best picture winner The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty.
And I'm grateful I did watch her films this year if only because that gave me Near Dark, which may just end up being my favorite of the six films I watch by these two directors.
In November, we'll see if Campion's final film, In the Cut, has anything to say about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment