Pretty Good

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

West German police inspector Frank Glass has been turned into a cynic by his hard luck story of life & career – he refuses to fire a gun ever since he accidentally shot & crippled a young girl during a sting operation; his wife & daughter have left him; his workplace is being renovated to his detriment & he is also on the trail of a serial killer who smears Vaseline on his victims' faces. With the help of his new assistant Shirley May & a prostitute girlfriend named Lisa, Glass attempts to catch the killer when the daughter of a friend is killed in similar fashion. But what he doesn't know is that a local drug pusher has information critical to the case & when the dealer is attacked & put into intensive care, Glass finally puts his plan into motion.Killing Blue (known in some places as Midnight Cop) is one of the most unusual police thrillers I have seen ever since I started writing film reviews. The film was made in West Germany in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down & reunited Germany. Armin Mueller-Stahl plays the main character while Julia Kent, Morgan Fairchild & Michael York round out the supporting cast. In order to understand Killing Blue, you need to look at the context the film is in. The film deliberately goes for the offbeat look, with a police inspector who refuses to fire a gun, who has connections with the underworld & who seems to be hiding behind a wall of cheerful cynicism in order to cope with his own personal life. The film's story is interesting, mainly through small but important background details such as streets filled with underage streetwalkers, violent drug dealers & cops who routinely drink on the job. The murder case Mueller-Stahl is working on is there to give the film a narrative drive although the payoff at the conclusion is a little weak. Also weak is the way Mueller-Stahl resolves his guilt over the little girl's shooting at the end by simply dropping his pistol when the drug dealer he has been chasing gives up.The acting is a tricky one to mark since the cast give a wide range of performances. Armin Mueller-Stahl is excellent as the main character while Julia Kent & Michael York are both adequate (although York is a far cry from his earlier works). On the opposite end of the acting scale, Morgan Fairchild, one of the period's worst actresses, goes through proceedings with a stony face & painfully flat delivery that makes the film drop to functional mediocrity.

I saw this film under the title "Midnight Cop" which may or may not make any more sense than the German title "Killing Blue". Depending on your disposition, a coin toss could decide if you wind up liking this flick or not. The mystery of the multiple murders had possibilities, but got squandered away in a series of convoluted circumstances. Chief among them was an entirely unlikely pairing of police inspector Alex Glass (Armin Mueller-Stahl) with still-in-her-heyday blonde bombshell Morgan Fairchild as a hooker named Lisa. If I had to bet that Fairchild had done nude scenes, I would have put that at the beginning of her career, but here she bares intriguing body parts a couple of years after her 'Falcon Crest' days. Consequently her face and figure adorn cheapo American video sleeves even though she doesn't have as much screen time as Stahl and British actor Michael York who performs the expected twist in the latter part of the story. I'd be hard pressed to recommend this for anything other than it's oddly calibrated casting of Fairchild, York and Sly Stallone's brother Frank in a role that was underutilized, and might have earned him a couple of bonus points for playing the heavy. As for the story, it takes a number of quick jumps back and forth in time that make things confusing, and if that weren't enough, watching the old cop Alex (fifty eight at the time) grab a handful of Fairchild's assets calls for a bit more stomach than one might expect.

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 jobThe 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.

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?