When Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break was released in 1991, it marked the arrival of a radical new voice in action cinema. Here was an adrenalised film about cops and robbers, centred on the intensely emotional bond between two men on either side of the law, that so happened to be directed by a woman. “It’s not just about breaking gender roles,” the film-maker said in a 2009 interview. “It’s to explore and push the medium.”
Throughout her career, Bigelow has routinely operated in genres primarily occupied by men – perhaps most famously with her Iraq war film The Hurt Locker, which made her the first woman to win a directing Oscar. But just a few years before the macho melodrama of Point Break, Bigelow had already taken a scalpel to the action film in her wonderfully sleazy Blue Steel, a deceptively subversive, female-fronted thriller that investigates the thorny conflation of power and gender in the male-dominated cop genre.
Jamie Lee Curtis stars as Megan Turner, a rookie NYPD officer fresh out of the academy who miraculously thwarts an armed robbery on her first night out on patrol. When the suspect’s weapon mysteriously vanishes from the crime scene, however, she’s shunned by her colleagues and suspended by the force for allegedly killing an unarmed man. To make matters worse, one of the hostages she rescues that evening, Wall Street money man Eugene (a perfectly slimy Ron Silver), becomes dangerously obsessed with his saviour and starts to commit his own murders, with Megan soon trapped in a cat-and-mouse game against a psychotic killer.
Against the grimy surfaces of New York City, the film tracks the frustrating ways that Megan’s efforts to apprehend Eugene are hindered by the very same systems she has taken an oath to uphold and protect. Her male superiors and fellow officers dismiss her claims of both personal abuse and professional innocence at every turn. It’s not until she takes advantage of the liberties afforded her by her badge – much like Dirty Harry did back in 1971 – that Megan wrests justice into her own hands.
The film’s gaze is thrillingly romantic: its opening credits, for example, are overlaid on top of slow-motion footage of a service revolver being cleaned and reloaded, ingeniously shot with all the hazy festishisation of a softcore porno that transforms the barrel of a gun into a phallic object. The same principle applies to the many scenes of Megan donning her deep-blue police attire; Bigelow’s camera leers at every buckle fastened, every button done, as if its subject were a masked vigilante triumphantly suiting up for a night of extrajudicial vengeance.
All these images form Blue Steel’s central concern: the disruption of a woman dressed in a uniform that so frequently signifies masculine authority. When we first meet Megan’s parents, it’s clear that her brutish father, Frank (Phillip Bosco), detests the profession his daughter has chosen. But what initially seems like a baby boomer-era misalignment of gender expectations soon reveals itself to be the result of something much more sinister, as an abusive misogynist now realises there’s one fewer person in his life he can victimise. The point is only further accentuated by the savvy casting of Curtis: cinema’s most recognisable final girl once again forced to rely on no one but herself in order to survive.
What could have easily been a simplistic “girls can be cops too” tale is instead complicated by Bigelow’s clever manipulation of genre cliches. In its blaring climax, her protagonist engages in a reckless and chaotic gunfight across crowded streets and subway platforms, bending the troubling politics of state-sanctioned power to her own personal interests regardless of how morally justified they may be. “Why would you want to become a cop?” one of Megan’s male partners bluntly asks her early in the film. “You’re a good-looking woman – beautiful, in fact.” She turns to him and drily responds. “I wanted to shoot people.”
Blue Steel is streaming on Stan in Australia, Starz in the US, and available to rent in the UK. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
