Two cop movies!

The first one is Blue Steel, a Kathryn Bigelow movie. Jamie Lee Curtis is a rookie cop, and one of the first things she does is break up a grocery store robbery, shooting the robber in the process (after he was going to shoot her). A stockbroker who was a hostage in the robbery grabs the robber’s dropped gun, and then goes mad with gun power — and with horniness for Jamie Lee and her ability to kill a man in cold blood.

The whole movie is stupid. The stockbroker character is absurd, the plot only works because everyone is a complete moron at all times, the relationships in the movie are awful. It’s well-shot and moody, and has an ’80s mean streets atmosphere to it, but the atmospherics don’t make up for all its other flaws.

After that, my wife was shocked that I’d never seen RoboCop, and we remedied that. If I didn’t know that this was a Verhoeven movie, I would have known within seconds, because it’s so clearly by the maker of Starship Troopers — there’s a fake news broadcast, there’s a co-ed shower with gratuitous nudity, and it’s overall got that satirical style that I associate with him.

The satire — about police violence and corporate assholery — is obvious and on-the-nose, but combined with a basically decent ’80s action movie, adds up to something enjoyable and interesting, if not great.