I remember first seeing "Blue Steel" on HBO when I was a little kid. My dad made me turn it off because it was too violent (I think it after the scene where Ron Silver kills a prostitute and rubs her bloody sweater all over his naked body). Needless to say, that is one of the few memorable moments in this otherwise dull psycho thriller. The plot is standard creep-stalks-vulnerable-woman-through-the-streets-of-New York fare. In this case, the stalkee is a rookie cop played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and the psycho is Wall Street commodities trader Ron Silver.

The flick has a few things going for it: slick direction by Kathryn Bigelow, who would go on to direct better movies than this one; some decent action scenes; moody lighting and cinematography, and an eerie synth score by Brad Fiedel. Put simply, I really do like the aesthetic of "Blue Steel." Pretty much everything else is abysmal, though. The script is terrible, the pacing is extremely awkward, and it struggles to hold any kind of tension. It starts off fairly well but then devolves into a series of endless scenes in which the psycho killer appears at random, disappears, is arrested and/or injured, disappears, reappears, etc. The first half is actually pretty good, as we see the Wall Street psycho lose his grip on reality and start a murder spree, all the while hearing voices telling him he is god. Unfortunately, the film becomes less interesting and more predictable as the minutes tick by.

I agree with the reviewer prior to me. I am actually taking a film class at my college and we brought up the same points the last reviewer did.

It wasn't the best coherent film I seen.

The fact that the killer "mysteriously" knew where the protagonist was all the time and also knew all about her parents and friends was pretty absurd.

Not to sound redundant, but I agree that a little more info on the history of the murderer would have helped the audience when it came to perceiving and understanding the movie.

In the other side, when it comes to suspense I guess the movie is okay. If you're the type of person that doesn't care about how coherent a plot is and just like to see action, then you will like this film.

Before anyone starts including Kathryn Bigelow among the world's greatest living film-makers, it would be only fair to take a fresh (and, in my case, mostly preliminary) look at her past work; so far, only STRANGE DAYS (1995) has struck me as being worthy of some note (this was followed by her two successive efforts and I also intend to re-acquaint myself with NEAR DARK [1987], which I recall as having let me down somewhat, while her first two films are not readily available). To get to the title at hand, this easily proves her most by-the-numbers affair – which plays rather like the distaff version of DIRTY HARRY (1971) by way of FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)! Jamie Lee Curtis is quite good in the lead, a rookie cop suspended for her impulsiveness and subsequently adulated by a mysterious but clearly deranged serial killer; when she realizes who it is and, typically, it turns out to be someone too close for comfort, the heroine still cannot produce any physical evidence to nail him…so, in order to exact justice, she has to take the law into her own hands. Apart from the fact that Curtis and Ron Silver (a truly obnoxious baddie) have no chemistry, which kills the tragic potential of their relationship (though her subsequent liaison, inserted almost as an afterthought, with colleague Clancy Brown – unrecognizable from the imposing villain of HIGHLANDER [1986] – works rather better in this regard), the script includes a totally irrelevant subplot in which she has to contend with an awkward familial situation that sees her mother (Louise Fletcher) suffer repeatedly at the hands of a violence-prone husband she, i.e. Curtis, despises! Inevitably, the elaborate crowd-pleaser of an ending assumes the form of a catharsis for the heroine…but, when the level of plausibility within the entire film is about the same as that of a Tex Avery cartoon, one should not be too surprised if it fails to resonate!