Irishchatter OK so i decided to give it a watch since it was considered the top 25 dangerous movies by Premiere and I thought why not, sure it might be interesting to see the eyes of a police junkie who is investigating a sexual abuse case from a poor young nun. I swear, I really didn't see any action or any interesting scenes from it, it was just completely dull and not interesting at all. We literally see him investigating the crime and being high from the drugs he uses. It honestly doesn't make the story flow in my personal opinion.........................I just think this film shouldn't exist if it wasn't gonna be right. I was very surprised that it got a 70% positive metascore and got 2 wins. It didn't need it really, it was just bullcrap, i give this a 3/10.

Ed-Shullivan No doubt Harvey Keitel is an excellent actor and in Bad Lieutenant Harvey portrays a dirty cop which is right up his alley as an actor. The Bad Lieutenant's name is not important which is more of a symbolism that this bad Lieutenant's life is not important but rather meaningless. As the Lieutenant continues to drive around New York city supposedly representing the city of New York's police department fighting crime, the bad Lieutenant is actually spiralling further and further out of control by digesting a junkies dose of cocaine each day and drinking himself into oblivion by night.The story evolves around a beautiful young nun who is raped in her Catholic church by two young men who attend the local school attached to the church where the nun is raped. As the investigation begins the nun is reluctant to incriminate the two young men who raped her. Instead, she enters the confessional and asks the priest hearing her confession to keep his oath of privacy and she will too by not telling the police who raped her as she has forgiven them already.The bad Lieutenant is not as forgiving, but as he continues to steal from local grocery store owners, rack up insurmountable gambling debts with the local bookies, commit lewd acts with young teenagers driving without a license, and take drug stashes for his personal use from the drug dealers, the bad Lieutenant chases down the nun's two rapists. As his own life is spiralling out of control we the audience wonder how the bad Lieutenant will revenge the rape of the young nun. This is not a story of redemption, but rather a story of a Lieutenant who has lost himself in the world of crime, drugs, and gambling and has lived the first 40 odd years of his life without fear of dying on the streets of New York. Harvey Keitel provides the audience with another strong performance but the story line itself is simply one dimensional and the bad Lieutenants repetitive bad habits and rants to the almighty Jesus or anyone else who will listen to him are quite frankly boring and lead the audience to the inevitable conclusion that the bad Lieutenant by title alone is not very good. I give the film a 2 out of 4 star rating for Mr. Keitel's strong acting, but I must say that writer/director Abel Ferrara's vision of a bad Liutenant in the city of New York's police force has been done many times before with better results than in this film.

freemantle_uk The 1992 film Bad Lieutenant was and still is a very controversial film that easily divides film fans and critics.Harvey Keitel stars as the Lieutenant in question, a police detective who is addicted to hard drugs, has sex with prostitutes and has heavy gambling debts. He attempts to get out of debt by betting more money on the World Series Games between the New York Mets and L.A. Dodgers, falling into a deeper void of drugs as he investigates the brutal rape of a nun (Frankie Thorn), a nun who is willing to forgive her attackers.Bad Lieutenant is a very dark, bleak film, centred around an excellent performance by Keitel. Keitel and his character goes through the ringer as the Lieutenant succumb to his drug addiction, taking its toll on him physically and mental. The Lieutenant goes through hell and we see him get more and more wound out during the film as he loses grit.Director Abel Ferrara makes a very grimy film, having a 70s look to it Sepico and Taxi Driver. The film is set in the roughest, run down areas of New York City and the city is made to be a cesspool of a place which is crime filled where people are gather round crime scenes. This is amplified by the style of direction, using plenty of wide shots and long takes, letting scenes play to their shocking conclusions and giving the actors mostly uninterrupted performances.Bad Lieutenant is very much an art house film about the decline of a man in a world of sin, embarking on sin and someone willing to forgive the people who did the most horrific act possible. It is a brutal, unpleasant work and Ferrara takes very surreal turns with his use of Catholic iconography.Bad Lieutenant is deserving of its controversial status with its violence, sex and it notorious rape scene. But it a interesting art house film as we explore one corrupt cop going into the depth of his own personal hell.

someguy18_69 "We gotta eat away at ourselves till there's nothing else" declares the Lieutenant's emaciated junkie-in-arms. He goes nameless, just the Lieutenant. When the case of a raped nun comes up, he takes special glee driving home to co-workers how the corporate church is just another racket, just another user, all with a compelling gleam in his eye. He makes a good show of his faithlessness but can't really escape something so ingrained. The agonizing tug-of-war that results from these two polarities makes up the brunt of the movie: the more the case of the raped sister haunts him, the more the Lieutenant dives to new depths. Unable to make a break with the Christian vampire cult, marked for life with their brand, he transforms the symbolic cannibalism of the Host body into a literal consumption of his own, spiraling in a kamikaze cycle of addiction. His quest for self immolation is obsessive, demanding nothing less than total devotion to appetite. He doesn't seem to dig any of it either, barely able to keep from exploding into incoherent rage most of the time. Self indulgence has never seemed so joyless.Again & again our noses get rubbed in how far this guy's fallen: snorting coke off his kid's pictures, verbally raping two teens, booze hookers bets- it's all completely absurd, just outrageous; you feel embarrassed for the actors. The flat documentary style allows Ferrera to explore depths of self-destruction in a way not many mainstream films could; the sleaze quotient is in service to something else. It goes so far over-the-top that you're not sure where the damned line is anymore, whether you should be laughing or cringing: that's when everything becomes really real. Ferrara's knocked us off our feet and we don't know where the hell this is going. When he isn't bartering away his last shreds of dignity, the Lieutenant glides through his world like a specter, hulking in some shadowy backstreet or stairwell, passed out on the couch while his family step over his drunken body. Hungry ghosts are people not fully alive, they're phantoms tormented and driven by impossible-to-satisfy cravings, seeking to plug the emptiness inside. It's like a lot of homeless people you spy on the curbside, not fully there, faded into the scenery. The living dead.The city this guy haunts is suffocating, inescapable; the noise, overcrowding and casual depravity make it modern day Gomorrah, perfect backdrop for the hell bound. Labyrinths of twisting alleys, decaying slums, disembodied radio voices- all crammed together tighter than expired sardines in a can. The place is like a powder keg, you can feel the burning fuse (the only time you get noticed in these parts is by having your brains splattered over the dashboard). The first world seems third, a cosmopolitan abyss that's barely keeping the barbarians at the gate. It mirrors the inner state of the lieutenant, one more cockroach scuttling in the dirt.He has a vision of Jesus Christ. JC appears bloodied and bruised, looking at him from between church pews, His silence driving our tormented soul hysterical. Teeth gnashing seems an appropriate description, a modern recreation from scripture: 'Oh father, why hast thou forsaken me!?' That this kind of thing exists simultaneously between some of the trashiest scenes you'll ever witness is key, of course. The sacred and the profane exist side by side and like, cancel each other out into this weird, feverish lucidity. Doesn't it make perfect sense? A technicolor MGM bible romp seems about as inauthentic to the spirit of the Word as you can get if we're talking 'spiritual' sinema, here. Without the dirt the lotus don't grow.A consummate termite artist, Ferrera smuggles in real stuff beneath his b-movie shells. Even something as vulgar and test-run as Driller Killer had heavier topics on its mind than just hocking gory goods, ditto Ms.45. Bad Lieutenant carries on the tradition: It's a warts and all portrait that drives home the meaning of 'Catholic guilt' like nothing else you'll see. That and Harvey Keitel's complete nakedness (ha ha) might leave unfamiliar viewers feeling guilty themselves. All of it will elicit strained giggles from those unaccustomed to such directness, such cultivated vulnerability and if we didn't live in bizzaro-land Keitel would've been the one picking up the golden statuette in 92 instead of hoo-ha Pacino. That any movie addressing religious identity and the G-word so openly got made in a proudly godless system seems pretty cool.