True Blue (2001)

***SPOILERS*** Almost indescribable plot involving this mysterious severed hand that pops up in the duck pond at Taylor Park in Boston that belonged to a young woman, Melanie Ann Hines, who worked in the Mayor's office. Boston Homicide Detective Rembrandt Macy, Tom Berenger, is put on the case of the missing body, since the hand was already in police custody, together with his super super cool and sexy partner Detective Beck, Pamela Gidley, by their boss Monty, Barry Newman, to solve this very baffling murder case.Macy who's already on the outs with his superiors in the Boston Police Department because of his my way or the highway attitude gets even more resented by them in him shacking up with the dead and missing handless women's roommate Nikkie Calderon, Louri Heuring, who if its possible is even sexier and a hell of a lot hotter then his partner Detective Beck! In that Nikki is more then willing to take her clothes off and put out for the happily surprised and eager to jump into action Detective Rembrandt Macy unlike his partner Detective Beck who despite her good looks is about as cold as the iceberg that sank the Titanic: Why is it that guys like Macy have all the luck!The film soon get a bit over our heads with all the subplots thrown into it that makes it look like it, or the movie screenwriters, is having trouble in making up its mind in what to do to make it more understandable to those of us watching it or just how to end it as soon as possible before it gets even more ridicules then it already is. There's the usual double triple and even quadruple crosses you would expect in a tangled detective film like "True Blue" but it doesn't just end at that. Detective Macy's actions are so over the top that you start to wounder if he's not on some kind of hallucinogenic drug or weed that he's secretly smoking or drinking besides the gallons and packs of booze and cigarettes he consumes in the movie.Macy despite his bumbling does in fact track down just who's responsible for all the mess he and the audience finds themselves in but goes one step higher in putting his fat head on the chopping block in confronting the person whom he feels murdered or knows who murdered Melenia Ann Hines. Macy does that by confronting the suspected killer on his own turf, Boston's Chinatown, with a two million dollar payoff in order for Macy to keep his mouth shut about him to the Boston Police.****SPOILERS*** Just when you and Macy thought that you knew who Melanie's killer is in pops the surprise of all surprises, in a movie filled with surprises, to who not only did in poor dead and handless Melanie but almost everyone else in the movie's cast! And is now planning to do in both Macy & Nikki in order to make it, in wiping the slate or cast clean, a full house! Macy who by now realizes that he's been suckered into all this insanity, the film "True Blue", still has an ace up his sleeve even when he's shot and left for dead by one of the schemers he trusted, against his better judgment, in! The old mud stuffed up the gun barrel trick that Macy's potential killer fell for lock stock & barrel!P.S Check out movie stuntman Oscar Hsu in one of his rare acting appearances as a bullet riddled corpse lying on a slab at the Boston City Morgue!

What happened to Tom Berenger's career? Is he difficult to work with? Or a poor judge of scripts? I always found him effective and interesting, and indeed he makes the beginning of "True Blue" interesting as he plays a cop with the unlikely name of Rembrandt Macy. I also liked the casting of the hip young cop team he's in charge of. And who can complain about Lori Heuring as the movie's mystery girl? However this cast is wasted as the film plods on and tries to startle us with a few switcheroos, but they are wasted as the audience has long fallen asleep before they unravel. Berenger appears to have happily settled in the world of direct to video movie releases occupied by the likes of Michael Biehn and Tim Matheson. Too bad. I think he's better than this. I had never heard of this film before I saw it in the library. Now I know why.

"True Blue", just another Berenger B-flick, is a noir wannabe in which he plays a homicide detective with a past who's trying to get to the bottom of a murder mystery while trying to avoid the bottom of a blond tart involved with the case. This budget conscious flick fleshes out only half the characters in its convoluted and messy plot, relegating the other half to the backstory or endless conversation about the goings-on of a bunch of bad guys we don't get to see. "True Blue" is the kind of flick you might want to watch on late night tv when your choices are limited to vampires and old movies. (C)

SPOILER I thought the movie was very entertaining throughout. Especially riveting were scenes wherein Berenger's character, Det. Macy, seemed to exhibit human fallibilities that made me like him even more...taking the "scared girl" into his own apartment because she was afraid to go to a hotel nearby. Going against his better judgement and possibly throwing a curve ball into the investigation of the missing girl whose had was found attached to the boat in the pond, he went ahead and showed some real humanity by taking her it. The real surprise came at the end, not that the girl was involved...I had figured that all along...but that his co-workers had set him up to take the fall for the entire escapade. And his use of the "mud in the barrel" of his gun, when it came, was not all that surprising, since he had seen a victim of a similar situation in the morgue not too many days before. All in all, a very satisfying piece of art. I like Tom Berenger, anyway, and I think this, though not one of his best efforts, was a good way to spend a couple of hours.