Killing Blue

I mean really! What are you people thinking? What did you watch that I didn't? 3.9 STARS?!?!? What I saw was a movie with no clear definition of characters, no actual exposition of the plot, horrible editing, inappropriate sight gags that should have been on the "blooper reel", and some godawful acting. How can you possibly assign a positive integer to this film?

I'm sure I must have seen a worse movie (though nothing comes to mind right now), but I've never seen a movie that was a bigger waste of talent. The script is barely coherent -- it's difficult to tell what relationship the characters have to one another -- and the director seems to have absent from the set for most of the filming. Put Armin Mueller-Stahl, Michael York and Monika Bleibtreu together and you could have an award-winning production. Instead we have ...well, let's be charitable and say that a couple of times Mueller-Stahl manages to break away from the truly awful writing and make Inspector Alex Glass into a *two-dimensional* character. Nobody else can even get past one. Yes, it really IS that bad.

and it must be the director of this so-called movie. How he got actors on the caliber of Armin Mueller-Stahl and Michael York to make this one I have absolutely no idea. I'm not even sure who Stahl and York are supposed to be. I guess they're cops.

My review was written in April 1989 after watching the film on Vidmark video cassette.

Aimed at the international market, "Midnight Cop" is an okay tongue-in-cheek cop thriller, befitting immensely from the casting of top German character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl in title role.

Bookended, like Martin Scorsese's "New York Stories" segment, with "A Whiter Shade of Pale" on the soundtrack, pic limns Berlin inspector Glas (Mueller-Stahl) hunting for a serial killer of pretty girls who's m.o. Is to rub vaseline all over the corpses' faces. Jila Kent (who also co-scripted) is his pretty new sidekick. Bad guys include guest stars Michael York and Frank Stallone.

Morgan Fairchild dresses things up a bit as a call girl who eventually serves as a decoy to trap the killer. Tony Curtis' daughter Allegra, who looks a bit like mom Christine Kaufmann, makes a good impression as one of the victims.

Though plot meanders a bit, Mueller-Stahl holds it together with his mock-impression of "Dirty Harry" tactics. Handling his English-language dialog with ease, he has subsequently landed a co-starring role opposite Jessica Lange in Costa-Gavras' "The Music Box".

Tech credits are fine and pic overall marks a step up in the mid-Atlantic genre for Austrian helmer Peter Patzak.

Other than interesting looking locations and extras, I couldn't find much of interest to keep me watching. The acting was OK but I just couldn't buy things in the script such as:

• the old cop physically dominating someone younger - a cop that won't shoot a criminal who's clearly pointing a gun at him (I don't buy the psychological angle) - a police precinct where you can drink beer on the job

The fact that all the cast actually spoke in English, while it was obvious they were all in Germany, also hurt the film for me. It just intensified all the other incongruencies in the script to make the film feel like a naive attempt at an American style cop movie.

Still, given the previous positive reviews here, I will give the movie another chance in the future. Maybe my opinion of it will change.