Director: Abel Ferrara
Screenplay: Zoe Lund, Paul Calderon and Abel Ferrara
Starring: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Eddie Daniels, Bianca Hunter, Zoe Lund, Vincent Laresca, Frankie Thorn
Running Time: 96 minutes
Genre: Crime drama
This film from prolific director Abel Ferrara follows an unnamed New York Police Lieutenant (Keitel) who takes cocaine and heroin, swigs from a bottle of vodka while driving, steals drugs from a crime scene, robs thieves and in one very disturbing sequence pulls over two teenage girls (Daniels and Hunter) who are driving illegally and forces them to mime sex acts. The Lieutenant also has a severe gambling problem and owes the Mob thousands of dollars which he is unable to pay. He becomes involved in the investigation into a brutal assault on a young nun (Thorn) when he learns that the Catholic church are offering a large cash reward. However the nun refuses to identify her attackers, saying that she forgives them. The Lieutenant embarks on his own spiritual journey.
This is a very gritty and brutal film. Abel Ferrara was kind of the enfant terrible of American independent cinema in the 90s and this features many of his hallmarks such as mixing violence with religious iconography. It mostly has a raw, stripped-down semi-documentary feel, with much of the dialogue apparently improvised. People who are familiar with Harvey Keitel from his recent insurance commercials on TV may forget that he was one of the great actors of his generation, and Bad Lieutenant is one of his greatest performances. The Lieutenant himself is a toxic mix of anger and self-hatred, and in among the more showy aspects of Keitel's performance: the yelling, the sobbing, the anguished howling, and stumbling around in the nude, the film works in the quieter moments, where a flicker of an expression or a look in the eyes conveys his disgust at how far he has fallen. The Lieutenant is an absolutely loathsome character, but Keitel manages to give him some shriveled shred of humanity buried deep, deep down.
This is a tough watch, and I would definitely recommend caution if you are easily offended, but it is not just lurid exploitation. It is a powerful and serious film.
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