Blue Steel

Blue Steel was director Kathryn Bigelow's first major studio film, following in the footsteps of her successful 1987 indie vampire flick, Near Dark, which, like this film, she co-wrote with Eric Red.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays Megan Turner, a bright-eyed rookie cop  who has just graduated to the NYPD. She’s not 24 hours on the job when she  blows some would-be robber (Tom Sizemore in a debut big screen appearance) to kingdom come.  Not good, but even worse the perp’s gun falls into the hands of witness (Ron Silver), a well-to-do commodities trader and nutcase who believes that he and Megan were fated to walk the path of righteousness.

Bigelow, who began her career making tendentious feminist short films, delivers a tense albeit ultimately formulaic psycho-killer thriller, her stylish direction lifting an otherwise banal script to a watchable level although it is Curtis, one of the most unlikely cops you will ever see, who seals the deal, her boyish screen appeal going a long way to making the silliness of the plot at least bearable.  

Whilst Bigelow handles a traditionally male genre with panache and does not try to make Megan a kick-ass feminist hero the whole gun-as-substitute-penis thing gets a thorough workout with, eventually, a raped and presumably envious-no-longer Megan over-riding the dictates of the (paternalistic) law and blowing her attacker away with said object. When one combines this with the initiatory event in which Megan irrationally empties an entire clip into the bad guy and combines it with the sub-plot regarding Megan’s wife-beating father (Philip Bosco), Bigelow's agenda is clear.

 

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