Sorry, this movie sucks

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This early Kathryn Bigelow thriller is not as accomplished as her later efforts ("Point Break", made just one year later, was a big leap forward), but you can see the signs of things to come. The film is sometimes dreamy, sometimes nightmarish, and sometimes very bloody. Bigelow creates a vivid New York atmosphere, and Brad Fiedel supplies a hypnotic music score. Ron Silver is very convincing as a psychopathic serial killer, Jamie Lee Curtis' awkwardness as a cop is built into her character. However, the script, co-written by Bigelow and Eric Red, is so unbelievable (from Silver's literally overnight transformation into a killing machine to his apparent imperviousness to bullets to Curtis' superiors stubbornly refusing to believe her until it's too late) that the movie becomes unintentionally (I think) funny at times. Still worth seeing for Bigelow's stylish direction. **1/2 out of 4.

NYPD rookie beat cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) kills a hold-up robber on her first day. One of the victims, psychotic Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) steals the robber's gun. None of the victims can corroborate Megan's story and she struggles to clear her name. Hunt starts killing with the gun and engineers a romance with Turner. A shell casing with Turner's name carved into it is found at the crime scene and she's reinstated working under homicide detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown) on the case. Eventually, Hunt reveals himself to Turner and later, attacks her and her friend Tracy (Elizabeth Peña).Director Kathryn Bigelow instills a kind of dark brutality to this story. The slow motion action isn't thrilling but has an artistic flavor. Curtis is great and Silver is interesting as a psychopath. There are problems with the story. I can't believe that nobody saw the gun. It would be more believable if it is only a kid behind the counter who doesn't want to get involved. At its best, I'm reminded of other dark thrillers like Se7en but there are a few head-scratchers too.

Rookie cop Megan, while foiling a robbery, attracts the attention of nutjob Eugene Hunt who proceeds to seriously mess up her life.Somehow I managed not to see this 1989 movie until 2013, and boy did I miss a corker! Superficially this would appear to be a decent action/psychological thriller, and it is certainly blessed with good performances, but it also saddled with a script where every scene appears to be written by someone who only has the vaguest idea of what has happened up to the start of that scene. To say it is full of plot holes is an understatement.When you take into account that it was directed and co-written by Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, you have a real puzzle because the script is what is at fault here.Having said that, there is something enjoyable in a slickly made thriller with a script which is as dumb as a brick.

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!