Blue Steel (1990)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2019) Try as I might, I can’t really find any truly compelling reason to recommend Blue Steel despite some half-promising elements. Probably the best reason remains that it’s a police thriller directed by a woman (the legendary Kathryn Bigelow) at a time when there weren’t that many of them, and seeing the better-than-average stylistic sheen she can give to the result. On the other hand, well, there’s everything else. An over-the-top criminal thriller in which a rookie police agent (Jamie Lee Curtis, not stepping too far away from her then-Scream Queen persona) discovers she’s dating a serial killer, the film unapologetically goes from thriller to slasher horror. It sits at an awkward point in late-1980s tropes and execution (intrusive score, slap-dash motivations, use of genre conventions trumping realism or even elementary logic) that magnify the issues inherent in the result. Some elements are lazily developed—the antagonist doesn’t appear to have any deeper motivations than just being crazy and while the cast features some names that would become famous (Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Peña, Tom Sizemore), they don’t really have anything interesting to do. There may be some ironic material in the film’s obsession with guns and gender-role reversal, but it’s not developed particularly well. For Bigelow herself, the film is eclipsed by her later titles, not leaving much in Blue Steel for cinephiles to investigate unless they’re completionists.