Blue Steel movie review & film summary (1990)
As the movie opens, Curtis shoots and kills a stickup man on her first day on the job. As the man drops dead in a supermarket, his gun spins out of control over the tile floor and is picked up and pocketed by Silver - a customer who hit the deck long before the shooting started. He is already a deeply troubled man, and the sight of Curtis - a uniformed female cop - shooting a man dead is the image that pushes him over the edge.
It goes without saying that Curtis gets in trouble with her superiors (the only reason commanding officers even appear in cop movies is to wrongheadedly strip the heroes of their badges and guns).
In the meantime, however, her social life picks up: Silver arranges to meet her "by accident," and they begin to date. She really likes the guy. And of course she never suspects that he was present in the supermarket or has a weirdo reason for being attracted to her - not even when dead people begin turning up around New York with her name engraved on the bullets they were shot with.
The movie is not simply a series of violent encounters - not at first, anyway. There's a half-realized subplot involving Curtis' parents (Louise Fletcher and Philip Bosco), and some vague psychological hints about why Bosco hates the idea of his daughter becoming a cop. The movie's weakest scene is the one where Curtis and her father leave his home for the sole purpose of not being there when Silver arrives, so that she can be chilled when she finds him there on her return. The manipulation here is so awkward the scene should have been rewritten on the spot.
Other moments are much more convincing. What happens is that no one - especially not the men of the police department - believes Curtis' version of the events. Nor do they believe that a respectable commodities broker could possibly be a mass murderer. The Silver character is intelligent enough to set up situations so that Curtis is seen in the worst possible way, until finally she seems to be the killer herself. But what does Silver want? In a truly diabolical twist, it appears that he wants to be murdered by this woman cop - he was truly unhinged by the experience in the supermarket. Silver does a good job of gradually revealing the demented depths of his character.
