Really Surprised!

Excellent adaptation.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Harvey Keitel's performance as a crooked cop hanging together by a withering thread is second to none for its type. You have not seen anything like it before nor will you ever again. It is a role he was born to play and a role he will be remembered for. No, Keitel will not be remembered for his part in "Reservoir Dogs"... he will be recalled as that Brooklyn cop on the edge of a bottomless pit of insanity in "Bad Lieutenant". Ferrara has somehow managed to make a film that is so shocking and twisted and yet at the same time a powerhouse of moral values that it ascends its exploitation material by the time the closing credits begin to roll. From the opening scene Keitel is out and about involving himself in every kind of debauchery from an assortment of drugs and alcohol to performing himself in front of a very scared group of teens that he has just pulled over in their "borrowed" car for having a broken taillight. In another scene he visits the location of a crime and does little more than just look at the victim's breasts. As pounds of crack cocaine fall from under his vest in front of his fellow detectives, Keitel is on a losing streak from start to finish. When coupled with his exhausting gambling debt that triples with every baseball fixture that fails him you know that it just can not get much worse... but somehow Ferrara manages to do just that and the many levels Keitel falls too are beyond imagination.The premise is horrific. As a crooked cop he must investigate the case of a raped nun who refuses to tell the police about her violent, and graphic, assault or to identify the perpetrators. She says that she forgives them but Keitel can not connect with this or understand it. He looses sleep over it and continues on his personal decent into hell. As his world is torn about him - a self-inflicted venture with no one else to blame for it but himself - Keitel can only find a last glimmer of hope in the resolve of the nun's case. Overall this film is dark and depressing not to mention has some very explicit scenes, but it is still powerful.Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

One thing I will say about "Bad Lieutenant" is that it was cool to see the movie's events play out during the Mets/Dodgers playoff series. Between that and the bets being placed on the games, it's not everyday you see baseball so woven into the fabric of a non-sports movie. It's nice.Along with that, I'll definitely say that Harvey Keitel's performance is unequivocally the reason to see this movie. He's unhinged, way off-course, on the raggedy edge. And the movie's title is an understatement. He's straight-up vile, a vigilante cop that dabbles in your seedier vices, pilfers money from robbery scenes and extorts underage girls to get off. He's something else. And my burning question the entire time was "Why?". Why is he so bad? Too many years on the street, too many divorces? But we're not given that information. He's just bad . . . because.But his misdeeds are so outlandish that the lurid and shocking reputation this movie has attained just gives way to over-the-top. By the time he's weeping at the feet of Jesus, it's absurd. I don't think laughs are what Abel Ferrara was going for with that scene. I know this movie's about redemption (in the Catholic sense), but there's nothing to feel for this guy. He's cardboard.5/10

What struck me even more than specific moments of the movie is the fact that Bad Lieutenant has been co-written by a woman, Zoë Tamerlis Lund. If you've read anything about her you'd understand how her own life story bleeds through the script. At a certain point you might even admire the passion with which she systematically worked on her own self destruction with, to vaguely quote her husband, heroin being her drug of choice.One summer in the mid-ninety-nineties i happened to be in a country where motion picture rating system had yet to be introduced. The weather prompted whole families to flock at an open-air cinema in search or refreshment and entertainment in the evening. It turned out that Bad Lieutenant has been one of the films featured. It would be interesting to know how all those people liked the movie and how it influenced the development of the youngest viewers.The reason to pull this story out is that, apart from artistic merit and portraying the dark side of life, it is questionable how rake and debauchery influence the viewers. Does it lead to some kind of catharsis or to repeating what we've seen on screen?Either way, Bad Lieutenant is a powerful movie, though not in a positive way. Harvey Keitel's performance is pivotal and you'd probably appreciate it even more if you've seen Werner Herzog's take at the same topic with Nicolas Cage.

This film was designed to have a lot of impact, and it does. It makes you want to vomit--I don't mean that in a bad way, exactly.... It starts with a recording of a NYC sports talk-show host venting rage at how the Mets will throw the Series, and that stupid rage is the only explanation given for Hervey Keitel's beyond-damnation cop. Keitel's character fits the old stereotype of NYC cops--before their Stop & Frisk effectiveness--perfectly. He alternates between doped-up-but-alert, and doped-to-the-gills. (SPOILERS COMING) In the latter frame of mind, he blearily investigates a nun-rape crime, hoping to collect $50,000, to help pay off gambling debts. After eavesdropping on the nun refusing to name her assailants (kids she knows) to her confessor, he decides to persuade her to tell him their names using the standard guilt trips, but she refuses--she says she forgives them. After she runs away, he sinks howling to his knees, hallucinates the incarnate Christ and 'repents' that he didn't mean to be bad, just has a weak will. Miraculously, the perp identities are given to him; he groggily shows mercy rather than collect the reward; and he gets gunned down in the predictable end to the film.Good film??? On the plus side, Keitel is cast perfectly, and the film is striking. Minus: I laughed pretty often at how pointlessly over-the-top it was, Keitel's performance and everything else. He displays only two expressions the whole film: stolid and dopey. There are limits to how much acting skill you can show playing a doped-up character--almost as bad as playing a corpse. There's no motivation for his character, especially the mercy he shows at the end--there couldn't be. No other actor has a part with more than one dimension. Midway through the film, Keitel stops two young (?) women from New Jersey and harasses them crudely; the women claim to be teenagers driving without their father's permission but look like 30-year-old whores (and one of them plays a "whore who knows what's coming" pretty well; the other is just silly). The whole episode is silly--Keitel is much less brutal than seasoned filmgoers will expect, for no apparent reason. But the rest of the film compensates for this mild segment by rehashing crudities without limit or purpose.Why give it even a 6? I'm not sure--craven conformity to other reviewers? It is a sort of archetype of scumbucketry. I think you have to look at the film sardonically, as a scornful portrayal of (Catholic) faith, repentance, and resolve to do good. The only thing worse is lapsed faith, disbelief, and materialism. What a choice.