Blue City

Screenplay by Lukas Heller and Walter Hill

Directed by Michelle Manning

At the USA Copley Place

Here was the film I had been waiting for all my life: a steamy crime thriller set in the lush Florida everglades, with a low-key knight of hard-talking, hard-hitting idealism taking on the odds and somehow pulling through. It was going to be another Key Largo, the 1948 John Huston picture that pitted Humphrey Bogart against Edward G. Robinson, struggling with wits and pistols in the claustrophobic setting of a hurricance-cursed Florida Keys resort hotel, with life, death and Lauren Bacall all on the line.

The beginning of Blue City looked ever-so-promising: Billy Turner (Judd Nelson) sits scrunched up in the corner of a bus bound for Blue City, quietly brooding as he stares through the window into the darkened landscape. But then, as Billy gets off the bus and stumbles into the bowl-legged dialogue of this disastrously clumsy picture, the facts I had heretofore ignored inserted themselves into my cinematic fantasy.

Walking into a typically sleazy roadside bar, Billy struts up to the counter, asks for a Bud, downs it, and hands the bar maid $2.00. "That's for the beer," he says, flourishing a dollar bill," and that's for the beer."

This was no Bogart-Bacall-Robinson-plus-Claire Trevor and Lionel Barrymore powerhouse directed and co-written by action-meister Huston. This was no 1940s period piece, taut and tawdry and black and white all over. No way. Instead, Blue City is the latest in what modern-day Hollywood sees as the cool, hip, where-it's-at youth picture, more empty-headed boredom passed off as the happeningest style.

All the trendies are involved in this one. Brat-packsters Nelson and Ally Sheedy are stars, actors who in Bogart's day would be lucky to get a job in a department store window. Walter Hill, the workmanlike directorial panderer who gave us such hyped-up schlock as 48 HRS and Streets of Fire takes credit for co-producing and co-writing, while Sixteen Candles and Breakfast Club leftover Michelle Manning directed.

Basically, what you've got here storywise is a young man, played by Nelson, who's been away from his sleepy Florida hometown for a couple of years ("riding a burro through the Grand Canyon, hang-gliding off the Catalina Coast," you know, just some regular, low-key stuff to pass the time) only to come back to find out that his father, formerly mayor and general head honcho, has been killed in the interim. The circumstances of the late mayor's death are, of course, mysterious, so Billy turns amateur detective/one-man vigilante squad in order to find out who was responsible for his father's demise.

The cast of suspects, though mercifully limited, is boringly predictable and unimaginative. There's the mayor's money-hungry dingbat second wife Malvina, well-jiggled by Anita Morris, and her lover business manager Perry Kerch (Scott Wilson) who spends his time working out in the gym and supervising some of the late mayor's more unsavoury investments, including a dog track and a gambling house-cum-bordello.

THE GOOD GUYS aren't much more interesting. There's the requisite good-buddy-from-High School (David Caruso) who's been roughed up by Kerch and needs to be convinced by Billy that truth, justice, revenge and the American way can triumph over the odds. The good-ole-boy Sheriff (Paul Winfield) who respected Billy's Dad and hence is willing to look the other way when Billy and pal Eddie commit a string of crimes ranging from destruction of private property to grand theft to manslaughter in order to get their man, rounds out the posse.

No film of this caliber is complete without a love interest--I think Nelson has something about that in his contract. My guess is that he and Sheedy must have hit it off when they were filming The Breakfast Club or St. Elmo's Fire because here she is again, a couple of hundred miles south of the locations in which we saw her last, but present nonetheless. As Annie, Eddie's straight-laced civil-servant sister, Sheedy doesn't have a whole lot to work with in terms of character development. In the role of a co-detective trying to help Billy solve the mystery of his father's death, she is about as believable as one of Charlie's Angels. What kind of investigator discusses top-secret, illicit information over a phone from her desk at the Police Station?

With such a collection of heavy-trendy names involved, one would hope that high quality production values would compensate for an insipid script and talentless acting. But if any money was spent on Blue City, it's tough to see where it went. The outtakes from Miami Vice have got to look better than this.

There is, however, one good reason to see this movie: it features the single most ridiculous line of dialogue in any film made since King David. Threatening his stepmother that she had better help him in sniffing out his father's killer, Billy warns her that she "will experience grief and sorrow of Biblical proportions" if she doesn't comply. Sorrow of Biblical proportions? All that I can say is that if you venture into a theater showing Blue City sometime during reading period or exams, you too will experience sorrow of Biblical proportions. Promise.