Coming out in 1992, Bad Lieutenant may be a little under appreciated and its importance in cinema overshadowed buy some of the biggest of the biggest films in cinema history, I'm thinking Taxi Driver, and yet it is just as significant a feat. Bad Lieutenant give us the worst character we can imagine, yet it makes him real in every aspect, it then reveals to us his world, and his place in them, and in the end, you have to judge for yourself just how bat the Lt. was.
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| No movie is truly complete without 3-4 minutes of Havey Keitel screaming and making faces... |
First off, Bad Lieutenant stars an actor I think is under appreciated. Harvey Keitel may not be gracing the screens of Hollywood blockbusters with his mug, like our future Bad Lieutenant, Nickolas Cage, but I can not think of any role Keitel has not performed phenomenally. If you've ever checked out The Oracle of Bacon, you will know that Harvey Keitel is the second for the actor closest to the center of Hollywood. That is one hell of a feat. However, I'm myself am still hard pressed to think of to many movies starring Keitel, that just means he must have been in some of the most important movies.
Bad Lieutenant starts us out on a path that leads no where but down. We meet the Lieutenant and then proceed to see him in a darker and darker light. He is a bad father, he is a junkie, a gambler, a corrupt cop, definitely unstable, he is a character no one sees as good. At least they didn't go with an ironic title and call it the Good Lieutenant. So clearly we aren't meant to sympathize or pity this character, he is the embodiment of evil for many I'm sure, and a sorry state of a man.
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| ...and it is even better when he is hallucinating Jesus. |
So, how do you take a character this bad and throw a good light on him? You can't you simply put him somewhere darker than himself. That is what Bad Lieutenant does, it gives us the dark and wicked streets of New York City, filled with criminals, junkies, whores, and corruption. Slowly amongst the inky black does Keitel's character start to appear as grey, although he keeps getting darker for quite sometime. But when the world gets even darker, the Lt. suddenly gets a lot brighter, I think...
The major pivoting point of Bad Lieutenant is when Keitel is put on the case of a nun who was raped. When the nun claims to have forgiven the unknown suspects, the Lt. tries to grasp how anyone could ever forgive such a thing. While he continues to spiral darker, he also brightens a bit at the same time. I will leave you to judge how much.
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| That woman is doing a cameo, but I can't remember who she is. |
Overall, Bad Lieutenant is not a sunshine and rainbows movie, it is dark, and any lights in that darkness are murky and dull. But the Lt. is a character like very few others, and Keitel does a phenomenal job at portraying him. I can't imagine the 17 year later, sequel (reboot?) shows us Nick Cage giving anywhere near that performance, although I will check that out soon enough.
If you haven't seen Bad Lieutenant and enjoyed (?) movies like Taxi Driver, or A Clockwork Orange, I'd recommend it. I think generally everyone should see this at least once, and I think it would be interesting to hear anyone's opinion on just how bad the lieutenant was. That being said, feel free to shoot me your opinion, I'd love to hear it.
Link:
Bad Lieutenant IMDb
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