Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

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

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Fulke Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Predrag 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.

Giallo Fanatic Most people will dismiss this as one of the worst movies they've seen. Mainly because the movie has an amoral main character and because the movie isn't entertaining and mostly uncomfortable to watch. But with the subject being mainly corruption and the theme redemption with an unlikeable character I find it understandable. I myself love this movie since I am into heavy stuff that makes me think and fill me with dread. This movie manages both if you ask me. I feel it is such a strong movie with some existential philosophy about a corrupt man starting to feel guilt about his life. Leading to his quest for redemption. The story plays out well, showing our main character's irresponsible ways ranging from gambling, drug abuse, taking bribes to harassing young women. I think it is such a tragic movie. The director certainly did a great job if you ask me, considering the hard subject he did his job quite thoughtfully making the story and plot convincing. Leading to a movie in my opinion one of the best tragedies ever put on film.Now Harvey Keitel is an actor I have the utmost respect for. I have yet to see a bad movie he has been in. He often plays roles that are hard to play and where most actors tend to slip a Little in playing their characters, I think Harvey often does his job strongly and convincingly. I imagine if another actor tried to do what Harvey did in this movie many actors would have made the character laughable instead of uncomfortable, pitiful and convincing. He is a subtle actor even in his most outrageous roles, also quite graceful. This movie is no exception in his acting. I could relate to his character, even though he was such an amoral character with very few redeeming qualities. I only feel this way to a few actors and just to name a few like Gary Oldman, Denzel Washington, Al Pacino and Michael Caine (I didn't write them all since it isn't about them). So yes, I am very fond of Harvey Keitel. He is a rare talent that doesn't get much recognition. But he is a professional and he keeps his life private which I respect even more.This is a thought provoking movie where the audience has to take part in the Lieutenant's life which is a corrupt life. It has a simple plot in which the Lieutenant is trying to find the rapists of a nun and find redemption. The story is good in which it perfectly shows how corrupt our Lieutenant is and it is full of subtleties where the Lieutenant even though harsh and corrupt, hides a good man that went wrong ways with wrong decisions. Oh and the existential part? The lieutenant is looking for redemption and try to do one good thing in order to forgive himself, what can be more existential than that? Trying to find meaning to his life which he has been wasting a lot. What a waste his life was by the way. After each time I watch the movie I begin to feel grateful for my dull life, because although it is dull I haven't sunken as deep as the Lieutenant. So in my opinion this is a movie that has to be watched again and again. Although it doesn't fall into everyone's taste. It is a hard movie to watch after all.

OrrinBob 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.

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.