Bad Lieutenant | | Cast : | Harvey Keitel | | Director : | Abel Ferrara | | Studio : | Artisan Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Widescreen | | Released Date : | November 20, 1992 | | DVD Released Date : | August 17, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | June 26, 2005 | | Summary | Harvey Gets His Kit Off | Content
 | Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) is a bad guy. He steals drugs. He sells drugs. He does drugs. He makes book. He's in deep with the bookies. He's into weird sex. He pleasures himself while he makes two young girls perform unnatural acts during a broken taillight stop. He shows off the family jewels. If this seems to be a catalogue of bad behavior well that's what director Abel Ferrara's film felt like to me. Ostensibly, Ferrara wants us to think that Lieutenant is seeking some sort of redemption in the form of apprehending the rapists of a young nun who for some inexplicable reason has forgiven her assailants. I could accept that if Ferrara didn't have to portray her assault so graphically. Of course we are also privy to the attractive nun's examination by the Special Victims Unit. Realism or pure exploitation? You decide. What redeems this film from pure sensationalist claptrap is the towering performance of Harvey Keitel who gets deep inside the skin of an otherwise despicable human being and makes him almost palatable. His performance alone saves it from being of prurient claptrap. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 09, 2005 | | Summary | Simply put... Keitel's Best | Content
| I have seen a ton of Harvey Keitel movies and he is awesome in everyone but he stars in very few. Well he certainly stars in this one. This has to be his defining role. His performance was so great that i dont know how anyone couldnt enjoy this movie unless they simply are not a fan of his. The movie itself is pretty good too but Keitels performance is what makes this flick. I applaud the director for having balls and i applaud Harvey for showing them off. If your a fan of the shield or just enjoy gritty cop dramas then this is for you. If yoru easily offended then you might want to stear clear of this one. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 10, 2005 | | Summary | A masterpiece of American religious cinema | Content
| A good religious film, or a great film with religion as a major theme in the American cinema is hard to come by. The Robe? Song of Bernadette? Give me a break. Or consider the pretentious rubbish bank rolled by the eminent Mr Gibson. The Passion was it called? More like really bad art. In my humble atheistic view, BAD LIEUTENANT is perhaps the greatest American film to tackle the difficult subject matter of redemption, forgiveness, and all those things Jesus Christ was on about before the churches got hold of it. Indeed, the nun/victim in the film is being truly christian when she forgives the two boys who raped her.
Mr Keitel is hardly off the screen for a minute in the film and provides a brilliant reality to his flawed character - Catholic (lapsed), family man, police officer, who, subject to the lower depths of life through his work, sins. And he cannot forgive himself, and suffers, and punishes himself. But he is no hypocrite. He also has a gambling problem which is a parallel story of falling further into debt to the one of his climb out of hell. As he gets more in debt he is witness to the New York mets comeback from a three nothing deficit to go on to the World Series - Darryl Strawberry features quite a bit.
There are some brilliant scenes - one where he hallucinates at the feet of Christ crying for forgiveness which figure reveals itself to be an elderly black woman who knows the boys who raped the nun.
Leonard Maltin gives this film a two star review and makes some quite smug and superior comments about it. He is wrong. It may b e a masterpiece of American relgious cinema. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 17, 2005 | | Summary | This guy had a LOT of problems | Content
| From the beginning when he started snorting coke in front of his kid's school you knew this wasn't the Dick Van Dyke Show. Loses at least one star just for those noises he kept making. Gains one just for having Harvey who makes any character a little better. The scene with the two girls in the car was interesting but had the potential to be more intense. Not sure which was worse his gambling problem, his drug problem or his sexual problem. A good example of some very self destructive behavior. Not a guy I liked seeing with a gun. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 27, 2005 | | Summary | bad lieutenant | Content
| Ferrera goes places that reach deep into the nihilistic, apocalyptic ends of the human soul, he's punk, crazy, fearless. 'Bad Lieutenant' is, among other things, a devastating psychodrama about suffering, Ferrera's style is almost jazz-like in its emotion density, he searches and searches and searches, goes deeper until something happens. Ferrera's cinema is all about things happening, this is cinema taken to a new level of intimacy, one that touches deeply and without compromise, when Kietal lets out his scream of agony, when he imagines Christ before him, when he realizes that it's too late, and when he dies too...Immortality comes to him when his fate is sealed, through death, it is only then that he reaches an understanding of what the believers would call his 'sins' but what he only knows as his existence. Ferrera, forever true to his vision, does not give the lieutenant a name, he doesn't need one, he is defined by his actions, for society he is a policeman, for the church he is a sinner, for his children he is a father, for his wife he is a husband, but in the end what is he really? This question can, in a sense, only be answered by cinema which is, as Godard wrote, above all things 'a mystery', a mystery can only be explained by another mystery and Ferrera just films it, records it, life, though Cocteau would have said death, unfolding before him. |
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