In 1994's Xenophobic Blue Tiger a Grief-Stricken Virginia Madsen Wages War With the Yakuza Using Her Ripe Sexuality as a Weapon
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Watching and writing about all of Virginia Madsen’s films for this column has given me a new appreciation for her as an actress. But it’s also made me angry that such a gifted and accomplished performer wasted so many of her best years on lurid trash that is utterly beneath her and her extraordinary gifts.
1994, for example, was one of the greatest years for film. In a perfect world Madsen would have ruled it as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, or, really, any female role in the film, up to and including Kathy Griffin and Julia Sweeney’s bit parts. That’s how talented and versatile she is.
Unfortunately Madsen’ 1994 output instead consisted of the sordid low-budget obscurities Caroline at Midnight, a television movie called Bitter Vengeance and Blue Tiger, a brutal revenge thriller deeply plugged into the anti-Japanese racism and fear-mongering of the time.
Watching Madsen play an endless series of dangerous femme fatales more than willing to use their ripe sexuality to manipulate men to get what they want I found myself wishing for a movie where Madsen just played someone’s nice mom.
Madsen’s husky sensuality got her cast as conniving vixens in a large number of largely interchangeable television and theatrical films but there’s a sweetness and a light to her that makes her perfect for wholesome moms and girls next door.
Blue Tiger splits the difference by casting Madsen as someone’s nice mom who, after her son is brutally gunned down by the Yakuza, becomes a dangerous femme fatale more than willing to use her ripe sexuality to manipulate men to get what she wants.
Madsen plays Gina Hayes, a single mother whose life revolves around her five year old son. Her wholesome existence changes in a heartbeat one dreadful day when she’s out shopping with her boy and he is killed in the crossfire by a masked Yakuza member whose shirt dramatically flies open, revealing the titular Blue Tiger tattoo.
Blue Tiger is a cheap, sleazy and racist exploitation movie devoid of substance or any real intelligence but Madsen nevertheless manages to inject real emotion and drama into a film otherwise entirely devoid of verisimilitude.
The future Academy-Award nominee captures the utter helpless and vulnerability that comes with losing the person in the world you love the most and have sworn to protect. There’s a heartbreaking scene where Madsen’s grief-mad mama begs to see her son one more time, since he’s alone and he needs her, despite knowing, on an intellectual, rational level, that he’s dead.
Gina has nothing after the child that was her entire world is killed in front of her. In a decidedly melodramatic gesture, she burns all of her son’s clothes and toys and belongings in an inherently doomed attempt to purge herself of her grief and her overwhelming sense of despair.
Our protagonist’s all-consuming depression threatens to take her life as well, or at least drive her mad until she starts having flashbacks to the shooting and begins planting the seeds of motherly vengeance.
Everyone mourns in a different way. And no one has a right to judge how someone deals with grief but she could have just thrown her son’s stuff out or donated it.
Gina’s next method of dealing with grief is even more extreme and unusual. She decides that the best way to work through her feelings of devastation surrounding her son’s death is by learning Japanese, dying her hair black and getting a job as a hostess at a bar popular with Japanese gang members as a way of finding out her son’s killer.
Harry Dean Stanton, who I previously wrote about in this column when he picked up a paycheck with a co-starring role in a Tawny Kitaen Playboy Channel erotic thriller makes some more money sacrificing his scraggly dignity as a tattoo artist who gives Gina a full-back red dragon tattoo that completes her transformation from sad mom to inked-up man-eater.
But Stanton’s primary role in the film is to deliver exposition about how in mythology the Blue Tiger is always looking for its Red Tiger soulmate. Gina then goes about seducing members of the Yakuza in order to get them to take off their shirts and reveal whether or not they are the monster who murdered her son.
She finds herself in the crossfire of the Yakuza’s many deadly business operations, such as trying to strong-arm their way into the apparently very lucrative tour bus industry.
Blue Tiger is a very dark movie in that it deals with bleak themes like the death of a child, grief, mourning, gangs and revenge but it’s also very dark visually in a way that seems designed to hide its fundamental cheapness.
This is a blunt instrument of a thriller that might star a genuine movie star in the maddeningly over-qualified Madsen but does not deserve to be seen on a big screen because it’s not a real movie.
Instead it’s the kind of tawdry schlock that filled video stores like the one I worked in at the time of its release, or aired on Cinemax after midnight, when the kids were asleep and onanists were up and raring to go.
Michael Madsen makes a perversely anti-climactic debut in his sister’s films with a cameo as the grizzled lowlife who sells Gina a gun. It’s hard to believe that two such disparate actors and icons could have emerged from the same family and it would be difficult to imagine a less exciting way for the Madsens to finally come together on the big screen.
Blue Tiger combines the innate ugliness of revenge thrillers with a soupçon of early 1990s style xenophobia. Madsen discovers, as seekers of vengeance generally do, that revenge is ultimately an ultimate empty and hollow experience, not unlike watching this grim garbage.
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