_Blue Steel_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Leaving the theater, I heard two people talking: "Oh, the plot was pa-thetic!'' "Yeah, but that's what makes it so much FUN!'' True, this is an incessantly lunatic enterprise. The story is increasingly inane, the characters get dumber every minute, and the gorgeous visuals make the preposterousness of everything else almost palpable. Still, Kathryn Bigelow's _Blue Steel_ is weirdly effective, intelligent, high-tech, low-plausibility entertainment. It's not exactly comedy, but drifts into nearly laughable cop-drama perversity and mayhem. And it certainly targets masculinist generic conventions with a kind of brilliance. A case study in the spectacle of compulsive cultural violence and the power invested in phallic gunplay, the movie attacks institutional law enforcement's obsessive morality. The credits play over intense close-ups of a revolver, the blue steel gleaming seductively; we cut to Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis, who, quite frankly, can do no wrong as far as I can see) smiling at the camera/a mirror/us, decked out in her crisp new police uniform. That smile is haunting and sublime. It gracefully seduces us, leads us into the chaos that follows. Megan is lonely but righteous, spinning out of place in her own world. Her best friend (Elizabeth Pena) is serenely married with babies (this friendship is represented almost offhandedly, but with consummate detail: they're intimate and lovely together, in a way that makes the vengeance Megan seeks for her friend's eventual murder both cop-movie conventional and feminist commentary on such conventions). Meegan's father beats her mother (try to imagine Philip Bosco beating anyone, let alone Louise Fletcher; but the situation frames Megan's emotional struggles, so we bear with it). In fact, the film revels in such familiar absurdities. Like Bigelow's inventive vampire-flick _Near Dark_ (1987), _Blue Steel_ is highly stylized and cavalier about plot holes (who cares anyway, about adhering to cop-movie rules you know by heart?). The streets pulse with neon and noise, and when Megan rides in cars while it's raining, she's entombed, with no outside visible through the wet windows. Closer in spirit to some wild horror flick than to tv cop shows, the movie amplifies Megan's mistakes (and her own responses to them) so they are ludicrous and looming - in another universe, she might be shrewd and Kojackian, but this is hyperreality, television as life as the movies. No one--especially the men--around Megan can quite believe she's a cop and everyone asks her why she is. She laughingly says she wants to shoot people or bash their heads into walls. It's a joke, but it's not. It's also a threat: women with guns? Is this a scary idea? For whom? Inundated by familial and social violence, her vision is skewed. But she begins to look pretty normal once she meets her nemesis. The film chews up every cliche of cop versus villain plot malformation and spits them out so they are pointedly horrific, not to mention contrived: _The Terminato_ meets _Sea of Love_ meets _Taxi Driver_. As the psycho-killer Eugene Hunt (note the significant name), the mumbly Ron Silver is Son of Robo-Sam by way of Freddy Kreuger, virtually unkillable and audaciously mad: this Wall Street futures trader hears voices while doing Nautilus weight- training in his excessively yuppie apartment. He first sees Megan, whom he deems his "bright angel," when he watches her confront a supermarket robber (Tom Sizemore, perfectly sweaty, swaggering, and vulgar). She blows the culprit through a plateglass window, emptying her gun into his chest in bloody slow motion and jump shots. Eugene thinks this is neat: she looks like someone he can both love and torture, and like a soul mate. This is a romantic, quaint notion at least, certainly pathological (romance and pathology meet in this film). He steals Sizemore's gun (which conveniently sails through the air to land next to him) and starts shooting people with bullets on which he scratches her name. Megan goes out with him a couple of times before she catches on (she's a little slow, but then again, she doesn't have our benefit of watching his plot intercut with hers). Her superiors want to know about those bullets, but she has no clue. After all, she's just a character in an increasingly clever and outrageous movie. She doesn't even see Eugene's bloody rituals and sexualized aggression. We see that he's stereotypically nuts and then some, so we share her frustration when he gets off on technicalities (no search warrant, no eye witness). Shades of Dirty Harry (but more incisive). Megan must go outside the law to catch her man - not to be confused with Nick Mann (Clancy Brown), the detective in whom she confides and with whom she has sex. Even their relationship, though, gesturing toward cliche (she gets vulnerable and sleeps with him while Eugene is hiding in her bathroom), remains resilient. It's not Nick, the meta-cop assigned to monitor her movements, who tracks and kills the killer, but Megan. Director Bigelow co-wrote the script, and her interest in issues of gender, power, and cultural structures of authority are plain. When Megan dons her badge, she's a cop, but she's also exposed and clearly afraid. She faces men who are suspicious of her motive or nervous about her gun. When Nick asks her why she's a cop, she says, "Because of him.'' But the pronoun hangs in the air - is it dad, Eugene, or some vague reference to male authority and corruption? And does it matter what she means? Isn't it more interesting to consider what we want her to mean? The film plays so close to the edge that it looks like it might slip off. The jarringly crazy moments are matched by a jaggedy, raw narrative rhythm, and the images are at once eerie and familiar, rough and lyrical. I think what I like best about _Blue Steel_ is its aversion to making sense. And the way that it insistently makes dead-on sense. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.