This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris take aim at Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, the 1990 psychological cop thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis as rookie police officer Megan Turner, Ron Silver as Wall Street lunatic Eugene Hunt, Clancy Brown as Detective Nick Mann and Tom Sizemore as the unfortunate convenience-store robber who sets everything in motion.
The episode starts where the film starts: with a gun. A very lovingly photographed gun. The dads talk about the title sequence, Brad Fiedel’s industrial score, Bigelow’s moody New York visuals, and Megan’s disastrous first day on the job, where a justified shooting quickly becomes a professional nightmare because the weapon disappears from the crime scene. Unfortunately for Megan, the man who takes it is Eugene Hunt, a witness who becomes obsessed with both the gun and the woman who fired it.
From there, Blue Steel turns into a strange mix of cop thriller, stalker movie, serial-killer melodrama and sweaty gun psychosexuality. Eugene scratches Megan’s name onto bullets, kills strangers, romances her under false pretences, reveals himself far too early to be sensible, and then gaslights his way out of trouble with the help of a lawyer. Megan, meanwhile, keeps telling the truth and keeps being doubted by almost everyone around her, including the police force that supposedly brought her back in to help.
The dads dig into what works and what really does not: Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop nobody believes, Ron Silver going full mega-acting mode, Clancy Brown’s strong hair and unexpected nudity, Tom Sizemore’s brief but important appearance, the father subplot, the gender politics, the fetishised gun imagery, the rain, the smoke, the subway shootout, the hot dog stand, and the ending that suggests Megan’s next enemy may be internal affairs.
Verdicts are all over the place in the best Bad Dads tradition. Sidey enjoys the brisk runtime, the style and the villain. Dan gives it something like a medium-to-blue recommend, mainly for Ron Silver and the direction. Cris is still annoyed about paying £2.50 to rent it and bailing out halfway through. Reegs admires the look and the lurid energy while also noting that Megan Turner may be one of cinema’s more catastrophically questionable police officers.
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