Abel Ferrara’s follow up to ‘The King of New York’ which in my opinion is the eclectic director’s best film - and I didn’t think it was all that good - came this film, the incredibly controversial NC-17 rated ‘Bad Lieutenant’. To show you how jaded we… or at least I have become, I’m watching this the other day wondering what in the hell was in this movie to warrant an NC-17 rating. Raping a Nun? Harvey Keitel going full frontal? Rampant drug use? Bad stuff for sure but the equivalent of an X rating… I don’t know about that. Regardless, this particular film has divided people with one side calling it ‘Genius’ with the other calling ‘Trash’. Personally I don’t what to call this. A great performance by Harvey Keitel surrounded by a lot of seemingly disconnected scenes leading to virtually nowhere and culminating into confusion? Perhaps. But it does go somewhat deeper than that I think.

The Lieutenant (Keitel) is a bad man. The question when discussing the character of The Lieutenant is what vice doesn’t he possess as opposed to what his actual addiction is. He snorts massive amounts of cocaine, he freebases, he injects, he 8-balls, he drinks on the job, he’s an adulterer, a sexual deviant, a partaker of prostitutes, a gambler, a bookie, a thief, a drug dealer and damn if it’s not even lunch time yet. He attempts to steal drugs from slain drug dealers, he cajoles teenaged girls into helping him self pleasure himself, he shakes down petty thieves for spare change and so taking all this into consideration, Harvey Keitel’s Lieutenant could very well be the most un-redeeming character in the history of movies.

So amidst all his vices The Lieutenant’s most damaging vice is his gambling problem and against the back drop of what I am guessing is Ferrara’s reimagining of the 1988 baseball National League Championship Series, The Lieutenant starts to lose what little control he has. Up fifteen large with the Mets down 3-0 he figures that there’s no way the Metropolitans win another game and he lets it all ride to catastrophic effects. In

between this gambling meltdown a nun is brutally raped by a couple of young men in the parish which has moved The Lieutenant in someway, though I’m not sure in what way exactly. Most perplexing to The Lieutenant is that the nun knows who her attackers are and is refusing to divulge their identities saying that she has already forgiven their sins, a concept that The Lieutenant simply can’t get with. Hell, I can’t either. By now what little life The Lieutenant had is destroyed as his drug addiction is out of control, his career is in ruins, and he’s in hock to the worlds most dangerous illegal book maker to a rather healthy amount of coin, with his goal now being absolution. Good luck with that Bad Lieutenant.

It seems that Ferrara shot a lot of this movie without any structure and it certainly shows in its free form style. There really isn’t a story to speak of as we just follow Keitel through one self destructive act to another to yet another. It appears to me when constructing this film that Abel Ferrara had a beginning and he had a point that he wanted the character of The Lieutenant to get to but not a hell of a lot else in between… other than watching his team actually win the pennant as opposed to what really happened back in 1988. Gotta love the power of movies.

However, recognizing that ‘Bad Lieutenant’ is lacking in a substantive narrative doesn’t mean that it isn’t without substance. It is satisfying watching Harvey Keitel work and observing the various layers of confusion he is able to insert into his character. Even The Lieutenant’s efforts towards absolution are critically flawed. It was a bit much though, in the final examination watching the character of The Lieutenant do all of these self destructive acts because how much do we actually need to see to get the idea the man just isn’t any good? I get it already… he’s a drug addict. How many times do I need to watch the man snort and inhale and imbibe and inject to finally get the idea that he’s a self destructive drug addict? By the time the movie winds down to it’s conclusion, what probably should have been more subtle and possibly even a bit murkier was heavy handed and obvious. The assaulting religious imagery and the Lieutenant’s acts of contrition led to the simple conclusion of the Lieutenant as a Christ-like figure, complete with his self-sacrifice. It was all a bit overbearing and ham-fisted if you ask me.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that ‘The Bad Lieutenant’ is one of most unpleasant movies ever made, it is worthy for the landmark performance given by Harvey Keitel who electrifies the screen in a movie that truly leads to almost nowhere.