Blue Streak Review
by "Stephen Graham Jones" (stephenj AT odsy DOT net)October 14th, 1999
Blue Streak: an inside job
Bad luck is central to comedies, simply because bad luck erases fault, fault which could make guilt. And guilt isn't funny. So, in order to remain funny, include lots of bad luck. Les Mayfield's Blue Streak does, over and over and over. As a result, it is funny, the same kind of buddy-cop humor we already know and love from all the Rush Hours and Lethal Weapons and Red Heats and Beverly Hills Cops already out there, movies which have pre-established that one easy way to up the comedy is to add a little Odd Couple to the mix--make the two 'buddies' incongruent, from different cultural/ethnic/racial/social/whatever backgrounds. That way their eventual-inevitable reconciliation of differences can lend a little closure to whatever criminal case they've had to waltz and stumble their way through, which in turn makes the movie feel a touch more honest. It's cheap, but effective, or, rather, is the kind
of low-rent device we expect from comedy, a nominal nod to
character-drama.
And of course Blue Streak makes use of this device, by pairing up Miles Logan (Bad Boy Martin Lawrence)--high-tech thief and accomplished improv-man--with rookie-grade detective Carlson (Luke Wilson), who's wholesome enough he even stops for yellow lights. Which is to say they're opposites. What's missing from the formula, however, is the big case they're supposed to waltz (Logan) and stumble (Carlson) through; it doesn't present itself until the Blue Streak's more than halfway over, which detracts a little from the trajectory, the illusion of
narrative arc. But so be it. At least there's enough bad luck to go around, most of it centered around Logan, which gives him comic opportunity after comic opportunity. He's Axel Foley, smooth-talking himself into everything then back out again, getting dragged out onto cases when he really wants to be inside the station, recollecting the stolen loot he stashed there when the building was still under construction (it seemed like a good idea at the time).
To add to the irony, too, Logan, in a mess of mistaken identity, ends up having to impersonate a burglary detective in order to reacquire his loot. And, as he already knows everything about burglary and the criminal mind, he's able to make the rest of the force look slow. And he doesn't just make them look slow on the street, either, but in the interrogation room as well, where his Sledgehammer tactics pit him against defense attorney Melissa Green (Nicole Parker) time and again, all of which is funny, entertaining etc, though it does introduce yet another deviation from genre: that Logan and Green never turn their
hostility towards each other inside out, get some love interest stuff going. So, along with the absence of a structuring criminal case, that makes two missed opportunities, which, in a movie without the comic talent of a Martin Lawrence, could be enough to pull the whole thing down. But Blue Streak does have Martin Lawrence, meaning it can afford to play fast and loose with genre. What matters in the end is Do we laugh, Is it funny? Yes, very.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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