Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 21, 1990 TAG: 9003212003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANET MASLIN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
With fetishistic fascination, Bigelow inventories every feature of Megan's brand-new uniform. The film's opening credit sequence is devoted to studying every curve and plane and crevice of Megan's new gun.
It's clear what Bigelow's intent is here. It's also clear that this former painter's exceptionally fine eye for shape, color and composition gives "Blue Steel" tremendous style, with a clarity and precision that can be truly breathtaking.
The entire film, crisply edited by Lee Percy and superbly photographed by Amir Mokri, has a sharp, vibrant beauty, an acute awareness of light and all its different nuances, and an ability to reinvent familiar images as if they were new.
Megan is smart and a little shy, proud of the boyish streak that brought her to police work in the first place.
She's well aware of the resistance that men in her life might have to her new profession, and so the men in her life are scarce.
One day, while still new on the job, Megan witnesses a supermarket holdup from a store window across the street, and the taut, frightening action that ensues shows off Bigelow's methods at their very best.
There is a shoot-out, and Megan is shocked to find she's made her first kill.
Meanwhile, in the midst of all the furor, something else happens, something that knocks the film hopelessly off balance.
It's a development that's absolutely essential to Bigelow's and Eric Red's screenplay, but it's something from which "Blue Steel" never recovers.
During the shooting, the holdup man's gun goes flying, and it is surreptitiously pocketed by a supermarket customer named Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), an innocent bystander.
Eugene is a successful commodities trader, and it is the film's contention that just beneath his high-gloss yuppie surface there lurks a deranged, psychotic serial killer yearning to break free.
From this point on, the outbursts of gunplay and action occur not because they are organic or appropriate, but simply because it's time.
As played by Silver, Eugene Hunt is so clearly unbalanced from the very start that his subsequent attempts to court Megan badly strain credulity.
In any case, the film asks its audience to believe that Megan would date Eugene, trust him for a while, and finally realize, when he displayed more sexual interest in Megan's gun than in anything else about her, that something might be amiss.
The rest of the film sends Megan and Eugene stalking each other through one unlikely coincidence after another, with gun envy a key element in their interaction.
Curtis makes Megan so appealing and real that the film holds together even when it has no reason to.
And some of the supporting performances, like Louise Fletcher's and Philip Bosco's as Megan's weary, disapproving parents and Clancy Brown's as a hostile fellow officer destined to become a close friend, also do a great deal to soften and humanize the story.
It isn't necessary to believe "Blue Steel" fully to find it gripping all the way through, and to be both fascinated and frightened by its icy, gleaming vision of urban life. Blue Steel An MGM film playing at the Salem Valley 8 theaters (389-0444). Rated R.
by CNB