SnoopyStyle NYPD rookie beat cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) kills a hold-up robber on her first day. One of the victims, psychotic Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) steals the robber's gun. None of the victims can corroborate Megan's story and she struggles to clear her name. Hunt starts killing with the gun and engineers a romance with Turner. A shell casing with Turner's name carved into it is found at the crime scene and she's reinstated working under homicide detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown) on the case. Eventually, Hunt reveals himself to Turner and later, attacks her and her friend Tracy (Elizabeth Peña).Director Kathryn Bigelow instills a kind of dark brutality to this story. The slow motion action isn't thrilling but has an artistic flavor. Curtis is great and Silver is interesting as a psychopath. There are problems with the story. I can't believe that nobody saw the gun. It would be more believable if it is only a kid behind the counter who doesn't want to get involved. At its best, I'm reminded of other dark thrillers like Se7en but there are a few head-scratchers too.

Blake Peterson It's hard to write Blue Steel completely off the map because of (a) Jamie Lee Curtis, (b) Kathryn Bigelow, and (c) its noiry, metallically inclined cinematography. It's a shame that so much of the film wastes its time traveling through various clichés and laughable plot twists as so much of it is truly inspired in its delivery. Megan Turner (Curtis) is a rookie cop who immediately makes a mistake that would make most want to immediately shrivel up and die: She overreacts to a store robbery and shoots the gunman with a gratuitous number of bullets. Megan is suspended. No gun was found at the crime scene.She is assigned to desk work, but after only a few days on the job, her world is rocked. Someone is gunning down innocents, carefully carving her name on the bullet in hopes to frame her. The police chief hesitantly promotes her to detective status so she can investigate, but he, as most other police chiefs in movies do, makes it clear that he is already heavily doubting every word that comes out of her mouth. Megan's professional life may be in the slums, but her personal life, in the meantime, is picking up. She begins dating Eugene Hunt (Ron Hunt), a well-to-do stockbroker. The relationship gets so hot and heavy so quickly that it's almost as if it was made to fit fluidly in the film's 102 minute running time.Eugene, as it turns out, isn't just a stockbroker. On the night Megan fatally confronted the store robber, Eugene was one of the customers confined to the floor. And guess what? He was the one who took the gun from the crime scene. And guess what else? He is the man who is murdering all those helpless civilians. It doesn't take long for Megan to discover just how disturbed her new boyfriend truly is, but no matter how many times she arrests him, he gets away, considering he has a high powered lawyer and her police chief hates her. But when Eugene begins killing people close to Megan, she takes the law into her own hands.The plot is so implausible that it's impossible to take Blue Steel seriously. At its core, it's an above-average B-movie that looks like a luscious art house thriller. If only the substance was as breathtaking as the style. Bigelow, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay, has gone on to bigger and better things, now living as an Academy adored filmmaker who has created masterpieces such as The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Blue Steel is her third film, and it's hard to call it a complete failure. Yes, the story is like a weird, erotically violent cop fantasy, but stylistically, it's certainly strong. Making use of silhouettes, city street smoke, and neon, the night scenes are certainly intoxicating, and the score, while sometimes a little too 1990 for its own good, provides an industrially minded, synthy backdrop that subtly exudes a cyber punk cool.Curtis makes for a fantastic woman in trouble, more relentless than she was in Halloween. Without her, the film would completely collapse. Despite the thousands of issues that come along with the plot, Curtis is consistently enthralling, acting up a storm in her action scenes and fulfilling likability in sequences of dialogue. Silver, however, is the film's weak link and most likely why it fails as hard as frequently as it does. Any actor could have made Eugene Psychopath of 1990, but Silver goes much too far. He's so over-the-top that any hamminess verges on irritability. Just look at the way he shoots people. He somehow gets away with it time and time again, but how does no one in the streets notice the way he dramatically lifts the weapon over his head and brings in down with the slow motion theatrics of Joan Crawford on the move?Blue Steel is a tough one to dislike. It's eye-catching and contains an important performance in Curtis' underrated career, but one can hardly tolerate an annoyingly off-the-rails Silver and a too-stupid-for-its-own- good storyline.

leplatypus This thriller is the proof that Jamie Lee is indeed a cute and talented actress but the story is totally crap ! I thought it was a realistic cop movie in which the cop is a woman but it's just about a crazy lover killer who is just unbelievable as much as in his motives and his acts ! Worst, the movie just can't stop and abuses cliffhangers (at her parents, with her friend, with her boyfriend (twice), in the city !). It's so dumb that it ignores flatly characters evolution : at the beginning, Jamie shot coldly a criminal and at the end, Jamie shot again coldly a criminal. As the crazy lover killer's gun jams, Jamie's one could jam also or better she could have chosen to do a clean job and have this crazy lover killer arrested ! But no, she just keep pushing the trigger ! So, sure, there was a wolf in Wall Street but this NYPD interlude left me with the blues !

TheExpatriate700 I had been wanting to see Blue Steel for a long time, since I was a teenager. I had seen a commercial for a showing on the weekend late night movie, but had chosen to watch SNL instead because some actress was hosting.I rented it over ten years later, and was in for a profound disappointment. Although it had a stolen gun premise that has made for such great films as Stray Dog, it suffers from horrible execution.Although it has some decently directed action scenes, Blue Steel suffers from an abysmal, genuinely stupid script. The stupidity sets in from the very beginning, with a major plot hole being the basis of the entire film. The lapses in logic continue throughout the film, cumulating to sink any verisimilitude the film might have had.Compounding the failures of logic in the script is the mediocre acting. Jaime Lee Curtis is unconvincing as a rookie police officer, while Clancy Brown lacks charisma as the homicide detective paired with her. Although the late Ron Silver has some chilling moments as the psychotic murderer, he at times succumbs to overacting. His scenes on the Stock Exchange floor are laugh inducing.The film does benefit from good direction and photography. The viewer definitely gets a preview of the skills that would win Kathryn Bigelow a Best Picture Oscar. What a pity those skills had to be saddled on a piece of junk like this.