Blue City

Fast, stylish, but the formula palled ages back and it hardly does justice to the Ross Macdonald novel on which it is based.

Scott Wilson gives a surprisingly lively performance as the apparent villain of the story, while good guys Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy strive to out-bland each other. The action is generally vicious, vulgar, and vapid. [9 May 1986, p.25]

The combination of slack script and coasting star is invariably lethal, and since Blue City doesn't aim very high to begin with, the disaster is complete. Even the gunfights are staged ineptly, and the picture's one big action sequence is so telegraphed that during a preview showing, when Nelson's character finally tumbled to what was going on and muttered, "It's a setup," the audience hooted happily in derision. [3 May 1986, p.D1]

A bad script. Bad casting. What`s left? How about the guilty party you can spot within minutes? Add a complete lack of suspense to that list and it ensures that Blue City will be on this critic`s list of the year`s worst movies.

Blue City is full of unbelievable, ineptly staged action sequences. It's most offensive, however, for its dialogue, and for the frivolous way it debases the shock value of obscene words. If, in 10 years, we wind up with an utterly colorless language, movies like this will have been at least partly to blame.

Blue City has exactly one thing to recommend it: Ry Cooder’s typically funky, steely, hard-edged score. Overall, it’s such a flabbergasting turkey--misfiring in every conceivable direction--that it may actually improve if you watch it with your eyes shut.

If it is useful to know that a director knows absolutely nothing about filmmaking, from script to casting to editing to where to put the camera, then there is one useful thing to be had from Blue City. First-time director Michelle Manning has spun a yarn that is grotesquely implausible, less affecting than plausible, and less attractive than affecting -- Blue City seems to have been processed in mud, and even Godard at his most perverse couldn't have violated the rules of camera placement and framing more doggedly. [5 May 1986, p.B4]