This is a movie about guns, two-handed combat positions, reloading, spent cartridges, gore, .44 magnums, shooting deaths in slow motion, and all that.
If you liked, say, "Magnum Force," you'll love this one.
There is one small problem with this slickly made cop thriller, though, and that is that it makes no sense whatever. The implausibility is apparent from the first action scene onward. Jamie Lee Curtis is a rookie cop who stumbles onto a hold up in a supermarket. Curtis, by the way, although she looks just fine in every other regard, is one of those people like Clint Eastwood that caps simply don't sit comfortably on, but never mind. Back to the hold up. The perp has got the few customers lying face down on the floor and shivering with fear. The perp is ordering the checkout man to give him the cash while Curtis, gun drawn, sneaks up behind him. She announces her presence and tells him to "put the gun down," three times, very clearly. She has a bead on him. So what does the perp do? He smirks, says something like, "I ain't here to argue with you, B****!" and swings his gun towards her. She turns into a human firing squad and blasts him through the window. His gun clatters unnoticed to the floor and Ron Silver, one of the customers, surreptitiously pockets it and leaves. Well, fellas and girls, the perp's gun is not found at the scene of the shooting. Furthermore, NOBODY, not the shivering customers, not the counterman, has even SEEN the perp's gun. It is automatically assumed by all of her male superiors at the department that she hysterically killed an unarmed man. (Maybe he was soliciting for Friends of the Earth.) And we have the obligatory scene in which the put-upon and misunderstood cop must turn over his or her badge and gun to his or her boss.
I won't go on with further examples. These impossibilities are only there to advance the plot, and, trust me, the plot needs advancing. First of all, I don't believe Ron Silver as a gun-loving psychotic. I would believe Ron Silver as a Jewish lawyer, yes, preferably Allan Dershowitz, but not an escapee from the Englewood Cliffs Home for Fetishists. If the guy could bring together all the voices in his head he could form a light opera company. Not that Silver does a bad job. When he pays an unannounced visit to Curtis's parents his eyes seem to glow with a rich hint of lunacy. Curtis isn't bad either, possibly because we already know that she doesn't take herself too seriously as an actress. She is brutally but engagingly self aware. Clancy Brown begins as a nudnik homicide detective who ridicules Curtis but then comes to love her, or at least to like her enough to bed her.
Well, I can't help myself. I'm going to mention another impossibility. Curtis is hospitalized and wants desperately to get out. She lures another cop, a beefy one, into her room, clips him on the jaw and cold cocks him. Wait -- that's not the implausibility I'm getting at. She then steals the cop's uniform and it fits her rather nicely. We would all, I think, like to know more about the cop who lost his uniform. For instance, why is he wearing a shirt with bust darts? But let that go too. We follow Curtis as she leaves the hospital without anyone knowing about it. She walks through the city streets. (This is New York we're talking about.) She walks down into the subway and we realize that Silver is following about twenty feet behind her. How did he get there? How could he know she would sneak out of the hospital? In police drag? Never mind. That's not the implausibility I was getting at either. THIS is that implausibility -- she has never looked behind her and yet, in the subway, at the moment Silver raises his gun to shoot her in the back, she whirls about and exchanges shots with him. This amounts to ESP on Curtis's part and I suggest her brain would make a neat addition along with Paul Broca's to La Musee de l'Homme in Paris.
The photography is dazzling, in many ways the best part of the film, although too much use is made of neon blue in night shots. Manhattan looks glorious from a helicopter at night, possibly because you can't see any people from there, just glittering skyscrapers.
I wish Curtis would not have shot the no-longer dangerous Silver at the end.
I mean, the poor guy had already taken three or four bullets in the movie -- par for the course for a crime thriller, true, but still undoubtedly painful. And he's now out of bullets. And furthermore he is as nutty as a fruitcake, babbling on about "seeing the radiance," and "you were my brilliance," and screaming at the voices that torment him. I realize everyone is panting to see this maniac plugged full of mortal holes but, after all, he belongs in a psychiatric hospital not a morgue.
Well, who cares? Not Kathryn Bigelow and her co-writer. This is a commercial piece and not designed to do much more than grab you by the lapels and shake you. It does that okay. It would have been nice, though, if the director, having lingered over such testosterone-rich concepts as death by gunshot, had seen fit to linger a bit longer over Jamie Lee Curtis as she rolls nude from her bed after being savaged by Silver. I guess you have to be philosophical about these things.
If you liked, say, "Magnum Force," you'll love this one.
There is one small problem with this slickly made cop thriller, though, and that is that it makes no sense whatever. The implausibility is apparent from the first action scene onward. Jamie Lee Curtis is a rookie cop who stumbles onto a hold up in a supermarket. Curtis, by the way, although she looks just fine in every other regard, is one of those people like Clint Eastwood that caps simply don't sit comfortably on, but never mind. Back to the hold up. The perp has got the few customers lying face down on the floor and shivering with fear. The perp is ordering the checkout man to give him the cash while Curtis, gun drawn, sneaks up behind him. She announces her presence and tells him to "put the gun down," three times, very clearly. She has a bead on him. So what does the perp do? He smirks, says something like, "I ain't here to argue with you, B****!" and swings his gun towards her. She turns into a human firing squad and blasts him through the window. His gun clatters unnoticed to the floor and Ron Silver, one of the customers, surreptitiously pockets it and leaves. Well, fellas and girls, the perp's gun is not found at the scene of the shooting. Furthermore, NOBODY, not the shivering customers, not the counterman, has even SEEN the perp's gun. It is automatically assumed by all of her male superiors at the department that she hysterically killed an unarmed man. (Maybe he was soliciting for Friends of the Earth.) And we have the obligatory scene in which the put-upon and misunderstood cop must turn over his or her badge and gun to his or her boss.
I won't go on with further examples. These impossibilities are only there to advance the plot, and, trust me, the plot needs advancing. First of all, I don't believe Ron Silver as a gun-loving psychotic. I would believe Ron Silver as a Jewish lawyer, yes, preferably Allan Dershowitz, but not an escapee from the Englewood Cliffs Home for Fetishists. If the guy could bring together all the voices in his head he could form a light opera company. Not that Silver does a bad job. When he pays an unannounced visit to Curtis's parents his eyes seem to glow with a rich hint of lunacy. Curtis isn't bad either, possibly because we already know that she doesn't take herself too seriously as an actress. She is brutally but engagingly self aware. Clancy Brown begins as a nudnik homicide detective who ridicules Curtis but then comes to love her, or at least to like her enough to bed her.
Well, I can't help myself. I'm going to mention another impossibility. Curtis is hospitalized and wants desperately to get out. She lures another cop, a beefy one, into her room, clips him on the jaw and cold cocks him. Wait -- that's not the implausibility I'm getting at. She then steals the cop's uniform and it fits her rather nicely. We would all, I think, like to know more about the cop who lost his uniform. For instance, why is he wearing a shirt with bust darts? But let that go too. We follow Curtis as she leaves the hospital without anyone knowing about it. She walks through the city streets. (This is New York we're talking about.) She walks down into the subway and we realize that Silver is following about twenty feet behind her. How did he get there? How could he know she would sneak out of the hospital? In police drag? Never mind. That's not the implausibility I was getting at either. THIS is that implausibility -- she has never looked behind her and yet, in the subway, at the moment Silver raises his gun to shoot her in the back, she whirls about and exchanges shots with him. This amounts to ESP on Curtis's part and I suggest her brain would make a neat addition along with Paul Broca's to La Musee de l'Homme in Paris.
The photography is dazzling, in many ways the best part of the film, although too much use is made of neon blue in night shots. Manhattan looks glorious from a helicopter at night, possibly because you can't see any people from there, just glittering skyscrapers.
I wish Curtis would not have shot the no-longer dangerous Silver at the end.
I mean, the poor guy had already taken three or four bullets in the movie -- par for the course for a crime thriller, true, but still undoubtedly painful. And he's now out of bullets. And furthermore he is as nutty as a fruitcake, babbling on about "seeing the radiance," and "you were my brilliance," and screaming at the voices that torment him. I realize everyone is panting to see this maniac plugged full of mortal holes but, after all, he belongs in a psychiatric hospital not a morgue.
Well, who cares? Not Kathryn Bigelow and her co-writer. This is a commercial piece and not designed to do much more than grab you by the lapels and shake you. It does that okay. It would have been nice, though, if the director, having lingered over such testosterone-rich concepts as death by gunshot, had seen fit to linger a bit longer over Jamie Lee Curtis as she rolls nude from her bed after being savaged by Silver. I guess you have to be philosophical about these things.