Blue Streak Review
by Eugene Novikov (lordeugene_98 AT yahoo DOT com)September 28th, 1999
Blue Streak (1999)
Reviewed by Eugene Novikov
http://www.ultimate-movie.com
Member: Online Film Critics Society
*** out of four
"Believe that!"
Starring Martin Lawrence, Luke Wilson, Dave Chappelle, Peter Greene. Rated PG-13.
Martin Lawrence is in the first stages of big-time Hollywood fame. The amiable comic got his very first breakout hit earlier this year with Life, in which he co-starred with Murphy. Almost right on its heels comes Blue Streak, another sure-fire box-office winner which puts Lawrence at the head of a genre-hopping plot and an unexpectedly clever script. He delivers and the movie triumphs. A nice recovery, also, on the part of director Les Mayfield whom I all but gave up on after the travesty that was Flubber.
Wasting no time, Mayfield throws us into the action. Lawrence plays Miles Logan (have you ever heard a phonier Hollywood name?), a high- stakes jewel thief, and in his latest heist, he has a complicated plan to steal a diamond the size of a golf ball. He blunders big time and the police are on to him, but before he can be arrested, he hides the diamond in what seems to be the ventilation shaft of an abandoned warehouse. After two years in the slammer, he comes back to retrieve his treasure, only to find that his hiding place is now a police station and the ventilation shaft is smack in the middle of the robbery homicide department.
He attempts to infiltrate the building by posing as a pizza delivery man. No luck there. "There are two kinds of people who get through that door," he is told. "People wearing handcuffs and people wearing a badge." Now there's an idea! He goes to an old buddy of his, who finds it in his heart to make Miles fake police ID. He enters robbery homicide claiming to be a newly transferred detective with an astonishing 16 (count 'em) citations in his former place of employment. Miles, being the seasoned veteran that he is, is partnered with a newbie in the department and proceeds to show him how the "big boys" work, often to riotous results. He searches for "his baby" while attempting to come off as a convincing police officer. He has unexpected success in the latter, of course. He does find the diamond almost right away, too, but nothing is that easy -- otherwise we wouldn't have a movie.
Blue Streak's plot is trite and generic, an assortment of formulas from all different sources, including but not limited to the buddy movie, the wacky cop movie and the always reliable mistaken identity caper. How does it work, exactly? A lot of things come together for Mayfield, who's a pretty lucky bastard, considering what he had coming into this high- risk project: a sharp, witty script from Michael Berry and John Blumenthal, as well as the extremely talented Lawrence, whose performance will surely help his Hollywood status (read: raise his asking price).
It got off to a slow start, and I was getting into that weird mind-set of mine where I am actually excited about hating a film, but 20-25 minutes in, Blue Streak was beginning to grow on me. I realized that the jokes were hitting the target. The script found new ways to wring laughs out of tired situations, and though it wasn't consistently the most hilarious things I've ever seen, I found solace in the fact that this movie would still have been made had the writing relied only on old, formulaic gags, like so many of today's Hollywood screenplays tend to do. I enjoyed the parts that worked, and a good many did, but I could even appreciate those that didn't quite get there, because most of them found fresh ways to fail.
Martin Lawrence rises above the material every chance he gets. A skillful ad libber, he is more than a fast-talking Eddie Murphy wannabe (Chris Tucker comes to mind). He is a good actor with a tough but strangely outgoing style. He has a way of looking like he wants to hurt you when necessary, but really just wants to be your friend. As a result, his characters tend to be less one-dimensional even when the script calls for a walking cliché. Lawrence brings that same spirit to Blue Streak, making what could have been a mean-spirited comedy an affectionate one.
Look, this isn't Dr. Strangelove. It isn't even Bowfinger. But for what it was, I liked it. Blue Streak is probably the most original unoriginal comedy I've ever seen: a film that finds new ways to handle situations you thought have been beaten into the ground by screenwriters past. ©1999 Eugene Novikov‰
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