‘Vampires are lucky, they can feed on others. We gotta eat away at ourselves...’
I should begin by saying that this isn’t a review for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nicholas Cage. Now, I only bring that up not because it’s a loose remake of this film but because it’s brilliant and everyone should watch it. I think as that film is so good, I always figured that there was no real need to go back to Abel Ferrara’s original. Dear reader, I was wrong…
The titular unnamed lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) is a bent cop. He’s as bent as a bent cop gets. He lies, he takes copious amounts of drugs, he sexually abuses teenage girls, he gambles. He’s a real piece of shit. Bad Lieutenant follows our despicable protagonist as his life spirals out of control set against the backdrop of a vicious sexual assault on a nun and a Championship Series baseball game between the Mets and the Dodgers.
We’re in the same ballpark as L.A. Confidential, Training Day and Filth here. All of those films were influenced either directly or indirectly by this one. But Bad Lieutenant really is a different beast. As affecting and powerful as other films in the crooked cop subgenre can be, none of them feature an appearance from our lord Jesus Christ. And none of them can claim to feature Harvey Keitel at his imperious best. The latter is incredible throughout and should have at least earned an Oscar nomination if not the golden statuette itself somehow managing to make his bad lieutenant occasionally sympathetic. He is at once nihilistic and driven, vulnerable and inscrutable, a mask of pain and the sneering face of police corruption. It’s an astonishing performance that is as close to a one-man show as it is possible to get in a theatrical production.
Bad Lieutenant is a grimy, thrilling, breathless movie driven by a real auteur behind the camera and a spectacular performance in front of it. A classic.