Movie Review: Blue Steel (1990)

I don’t think Blue Steel is particularly a smart movie, but it’s smartly done, if that makes sense. Director and co-writer Kathryn Bigelow has made a movie so rife with paranoia that you don’t really mind how ridiculously over-the-top it is.

Rookie cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) foils an armed robbery, killing the robber.

But one of the witnesses, Wall Street trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) grabs the man’s gun and disappears before any cops can question him about what he witnessed. As a result, Turner has seemingly blown away an unarmed man (the cashier claims he was armed, but can’t remember what he had). It’s a strange inciting incident, as it just seems pretty ridiculous.

Turner’s suspended, and Hunt goes around killing people. He eventually meets Megan and starts dating her, carving her name into the bullets that he uses amdist his serial killings.

Turner has one cop ally, veteran detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown, giving probably my favorite performance in the movie), but other than that, she’s on her own, even considered a suspect however briefly.

This is where the movie gets really interesting, as Turner figures out that Hunt is the .44 Magnum Killer that people are after (she doesn’t yet realize he’s the one who stole the gun from the crime scene, but whatever), and she tries to arrest him numerous times, but she really has no evidence against him. Her suspicions are all from stuff he said and not much he’s actually done. And even when he does something right in front of her fucking face, he still has an excuse to get out of an arrest.

So the movie does get a little repetitive for a while, but I do like the cat and mouse game going on here. Both Jamie Lee Curtis and Ron Silver are quite good, and their solid performances — along with the eventual bloodbath of squibs — make it all worth sitting through.

Rating: 7/10