35mm print!
Blue Steel may have premiered at Sundance in January 1990, but it was very much a response to the raging testosterone of ’80s actioners like Commando, Raw Deal, and Cobra ― and a message that their toxic subtexts were bleeding into the real world.
Kathryn Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red’s followup to their revisionist vampire western Near Dark shifts to an entirely different genre ― the hyper-polished action movie ― and flips the lens on it, casting Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner, a rookie cop who takes down a robbery suspect on her first patrol in the presence of a twitchy Wall Street trader (Ron Silver), who uses the incident to start dating Megan without ever bothering to mention he picked up the gun the robber dropped that night ― or that he’s running around New York playing vigilante with it.
It’s a squirmy, boundary-pushing film that takes familiar narrative elements and turns them inside out, using the conventions of the cop movie (and the post–Fatal Attraction erotic thriller) to spin a story of one woman who’s being gaslit from every corner. I’ve been telling people for years that Blue Steel is one of Curtis’ best performances, and one of Bigelow’s most underrated films; now you can see for yourself.
NORM WILNER
Content advisory: violence, coarse language
Image courtesy of Lionsgate