Killing Blue

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.

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.

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?

This is the story of a police inspector who is carrying the weight of inadvertently injuring a little girl in the process of apprehending a drug dealer. A young woman is killed. He gets together with a prostitute in order to get more information and pursue the evildoer. In the process there is a series of encounters with Morgan Fairchild. It's all eye candy and voyeurism. There is little to recommend this movie. It is frenetic and wanders around all over the place. Of course, Morgan Fairchild, being the great Shakespearean actress that she is, puts forth a masterful performance. Armin Mueller-Stah, a German actor, and Michael York don't fair much better in their roles. It just didn't seem like it was worth the time.

An aging, cynical detective in dreary Berlin (Armin Mueller-Stahl) investigates the murder of a young woman while dealing with a new female partner who hasn't lost sight of virtue (Julia Kent). Michael York plays the DA, Frank Stallone a pusher and Morgan Fairchild a hooker.

"Midnight Cop" (1988), aka "Killing Blue," is a dreary big city detective drama/thriller with enough entertaining aspects to make it worthwhile for those interested, but it's horribly marred by awkward editing. I don't know if the jerky pacing was a Euro thang at the time or the filmmakers were trying to be avant-garde (or perhaps it's just incompetence?). But, if you can acclimate, there are several highlights, including the winsome Julia Kent and the stunning Morgan Fairchild, not to mention a couple of other beauties. Meanwhile, the jazzy score is interesting with "Whiter Shade of Pale" thrown into the mix. And, despite the darkness, there is some effective humor.

It's basically an 80's Euro meshing of movies like the Dirty Harry flicks, "The Organization" (1971), "Death Wish" (1974) and "Lantana" (2001), just lacking their editing smoothness. I advise using the subtitles since the mumbled dialogue is often hard to make out (especially by Mueller-Stahl). Speaking of which, although the characters speak English (some of it obviously dubbed), you're supposed to imagine they're speaking German.

The film runs 1 hour, 35-40 minutes, and was shot in West Berlin, Germany, but don't expect any beautiful shots of the city as the urban photography is always dark, grey, industrial and unappealing, which fits the mood of course.

GRADE: C+/B-