A Mean Little Cop Thriller

Read Time:7 Minute, 10 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Cold Steel (Retro VHS Packaging)
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Genre: Action/Adventure, Thriller
Year Released: 1987, 2026 Mill Creek Blu-ray
Runtime: 1h 30m
Director(s): Dorothy Ann Puzo
Writer(s): Michael Sonye, Dorothy Ann Puzo, Lisa M. Hansen
Cast: Brad Davis, Sharon Stone, Jonathan Banks, Jay Acovone, Adam Ant, Eddie Egan, Sy Richardson, Anne Haney, Anthony LaPaglia
Where to Watch: available June 23, 2026, pre-order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: Some action movies feel like they survive their because of their dents and bruises. COLD STEEL is one of those rough 80s cop thrillers where the flaws are easy to spot, sometimes impossible to ignore, but ultimately, they don’t come close to erasing the strange appeal of watching it push against and through its own limitations. It’s too uneven to call overlooked greatness, too clunky to pretend its story mechanics are perfect, and too personality-packed to dismiss as disposable. The movie lives in that chaotic middle ground where a few sharp edges, a few bizarre choices, and some hard-hitting action keep it from falling off the ledge whenever the drama stalls.

The setup is as direct as these movies get. Brad Davis plays Johnny Modine, an L.A. detective whose Christmas Eve takes a brutal turn when his father is murdered. The killing isn’t random, even if the film takes its time putting the pieces together. Jonathan Banks plays Isaac, also known as Iceman (it was the late 80s after all), a disfigured killer with a personal grudge against Johnny and a theatrical sense of revenge that turns the story into a cat-and-mouse game built around wounds, bad decisions, and a whole lot of scowling. Sharon Stone enters the story as Kathy Connors, a woman whose role in Johnny’s life is clearly more complicated than it first appears. Adam Ant also shows up as Mick, the kind of sidekick who seems to have been pulled in from a different, louder movie.

COLD STEEL works best when it remembers that it’s a scuzzy action thriller instead of a serious study of guilt, grief, and vengeance. The emotional material is lean, and the film doesn’t always seem interested in doing the work needed to make Johnny’s pain feel as important as it could have. His father’s murder should give the entire movie a more impactful emotional fallout, but too much of the middle act drifts through genre cliches without enough pressure behind it. Johnny drinks, snaps, investigates, flirts, fights, and hunts, but the connective tissue is often weaker than the individual moments. The result is a movie that can feel both too simple and weirdly overcomplicated, especially once the revenge plot starts revealing how many personal connections are driving the violence.

That said, there is something about its overstuffed personality. Dorothy Ann Puzo, making her only feature as director, doesn’t deliver an elegant film, but she does deliver one with a strange mix of impulses. COLD STEEL wants to be a hard-boiled revenge picture, a Christmas-set cop thriller, a sleazy neo-noir, a buddy-cop flick, a stunt showcase, and a trashy late-night cable find all at once. Those pieces don’t lock together, but the friction gives the film more character than a smoother, blander version would. It’s the kind of movie where a scene can feel underwritten and overdirected at the same time, then suddenly wake up because a car chase or an offbeat supporting performance jolts it back to life.

The action set pieces are the strongest argument for the film’s survival. When COLD STEEL gets moving, it has real physical weight. The car stunts bring the kind of practical harm modern action fans often miss, with vehicles jumping, crashing, swerving, and taking actual damage. The standout sequence at a racetrack has the reckless energy of filmmakers deciding that the movie needs a shock. Those scenes remind you why a film like this can earn affection decades later, despite never fully coming together as drama.

Brad Davis gives Johnny a bruised, hard-drinking presence, though the character is more attitude than depth. He has the face and intensity for this world, but the writing doesn’t always give him enough to play with beyond anger, suspicion, and self-destruction. He’s believable as a cop whose life is sliding sideways, yet the film rarely lets that cut as deeply as it should. Jay Acovone brings some looseness as Cookie, Johnny’s partner, and their scenes occasionally suggest a more relaxed buddy-cop movie hiding underneath the revenge thriller. The banter doesn’t always work perfectly, but the partnership lends the film much-needed humanity amid the murders, threats, and vehicular chaos.

Jonathan Banks is easily one of the film’s best assets. Isaac could’ve been a flat, basic villain, but Banks gives him a cold, damaged menace that fits the movie’s grimy personality. The voice-box element could have turned ridiculous in the wrong hands, and to be fair, the film does flirt with that. Banks still makes it work more often than not because he commits to Isaac as a bitter, broken man rather than just a gimmick. Adam Ant, meanwhile, seems to understand the assignment from a totally different angle. Mick is exaggerated, cocky, and strange, and that off-center energy helps keep the villains from becoming too stiff.

Sharon Stone’s Kathy is trickier because the movie clearly sees her as dangerous, seductive, wounded, and mysterious, but it doesn’t give her enough depth to make all of that feel earned. Stone has presence, and even this early in her career, the camera knows it. The problem is that Kathy often feels like a plot device dressed up as a femme fatale. Her scenes with Johnny have the shape of noir, but not enough psychological bite. The film wants her to complicate the revenge story, yet she’s too often defined by what the plot needs her to be in the moment.

The Christmas setting adds without taking over the movie. COLD STEEL isn’t a holiday action classic, but it does belong in that category of seasonal genre oddities where Christmas functions more like a bitter backdrop than a jolly atmosphere. The holiday details make the violence feel meaner, and the city feel colder, even when the movie forgets to lean into that. There’s a foulness to the idea of a revenge thriller unfolding during the season of family, grief, and forced cheer, but the film uses Christmas only as a hook, not as a worldview.

COLD STEEL lands as a flawed but watchable blast of late-80s action grind. It’s not tight enough to be great, not smart enough to be as sharp as it could have been, and not consistent enough to rise above its genre programming. Yet, the cast, the stunt work, the strange tonal swings, and the one-and-done curiosity of Dorothy Ann Puzo’s direction make it more interesting than its weakest scenes suggest. This is the kind of movie that benefits from VHS-era expectations, where rough edges weren’t always disqualifying, and a few memorable bursts of chaos could carry a lot of dead weight.

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