Screenhead

Cop dramas are often entertaining, but in the case of Bad Lieutenant, recently rereleased on DVD thanks to Lions Gate, it’s not so much entertaining as it is a strange, compelling journey that really doesn’t end well.

Harvey Keitel plays the titular Bad Lieutenant, a family man, a good Catholic, a thief, a murderer, an inveterate gambler.  It’s this last that’s going to land him neck-deep in trouble as he bets repeatedly on the outcome of the World Series and finds himself running afoul of the very worst bookies have to offer.  But he just may find redemption in pursuing a case involving the rape of a nun.

Bad Lieutenant is not an easy movie to follow.  It’s not a simple movie.  It’s actually rather deep, and sometimes prone to rambling.  Everything that happens is almost just shown to kill time until the next bet.  One particularly memorable sequence involves our cop accosting two young ladies out for an evening.  It’s pretty graphic, and frankly, just features Keitel alternately muttering and shrieking obscenities for most of three minutes.

That and suddenly watching a nun get raped isn’t exactly the kind of thing you want to see, either.  Even if you know it’s coming it’s still not the kind of thing you ever want to see.

Interestingly, neither is Harvey Keitel blubbering on a cathedral floor for nearly four straight minutes, but for a much different reason.

I can’t tell if Bad Lieutenant is trying to be a pompous, overblown waste of film or it just turned out that way.  And yet, at the same time, it’s actually fun, sometimes.  It’s really tough to say conclusively how to feel about Bad Lieutenant, because just as it gets horrible for some reason, and by the time your disgust starts to register, they’ll segue into something new and interesting.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale has no real choice but to award the badly schizophrenic Bad Lieutenant a six out of ten for averaging out to pretty good.  It’s awful, it’s exciting, it’s entertaining, it’s boring.  It’s everything a movie can be, and most of which you don’t want it to be.

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