Blue Steel
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Silver, Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Peña, Louise Fletcher, Philip Bosco, Kevin Dunn, Richard Jenkins
Seen on: 7.8.2016

Plot:
Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) only just finished police school and she’s eager to work and to prove herself. On her first patrol, she becomes involved in a robbery, leading to her shooting the armed robber. One of the bystanders, Eugene (Ron Silver), grabs the robber’s gun, though, and leaves before he can be noticed. Since it now appears that Megan shot an unarmed man, she is suspended from work, only to be reinstated after a deadly bullet is recovered from a murder scene with her name carved onto it – and homicide detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown) counts on her help to catch the killer.

Blue Steel is a more than decent thriller with a fantastic Jamie Lee Curtis and a tense story. It pretty much kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time.

[SPOILERS]

On the surface, Blue Steel sounds like many other thrillers that came before it. But I was quite surprised by a few things in the story and the film that I didn’t expect to go the way they did. There’s the fact that Megan has sex with more than one person in the film and it’s never a big deal. Even though it’s not necessarily casual sex, it’s not really a great big romantic love story either.

And she quite definitely has sex with the wrong person – Eugene, who she really liked before finding out that he was an obsessive killer. But as soon as she knew, there was no weird “but he is a good guy and I like him” fuckery. No, Megan drops his ass without hesitation. Yes, it’s weird that this is something that makes the movie special, but that’s the world we live in.

How Eugene’s obsession was handled was also well done. It’s pretty clear that his obsession has nothing to do with Megan as a person, she was simply the right person at the right time to kickstart his pathology. And it’s superclear that he’s a creep, even in his most charming moments. Maybe especially then. It’s a tough balance to keep because you need to believe that Megan would fall for him while not forget that he’s the villain of the film.

Fortunately, Bigelow knows how to keep that balance and with the terrific cast, above all the stupendous Jamie Lee Curtis in probably one of her strongest moments, the film has all the right ingredients to keep you glued to the screen. It certainly worked for me.

Summarizing: excellent.