Well, I'm caught up now since I was on vacation last week, and I just finished Bad Lieutenant, which I kinda think is a bad title, but whatever.
This looks very much like a gritty, controversial, no punches pulled, in your face drama you'd expect from the 70s. Seriously, if I didn't see that it was from the 90s, I would have thought it came out in the 70s, and I would have just thought Keital looked like an older, strungout dude on purpose. I liked the look and feel of this. Raw and unflinching.
A problem I had with it is that most of the movie seems pretty aimless. We have so many drawn out scenes of him abusing drugs that it got tiresome to watch. Knowing that the script was only 65 pages and a lot of the film was improvised and done on the fly is evident. There seemed to be a lot of padding in between the plot points.
I'm already a big fan of Harvey Keital, and seeing this only added on to my appreciation of him. His whale-like groans were sorta strange and comical, and maybe a tad bit over the top, but I still think he was awesome. Him and De Niro both play the angry, imposing man very similar. If this character was cursing and yelling at me while waiving a gun in my face, I'd be shitting myself. I've had a gun pulled on me before, and the punk was no Harvey Keital bad ass, which thank goodness for me.
The film's climax rests on him letting the two rapists go because he was trying to forgive them like the nun did. This final act of forgiveness was an attempt on his part to find forgiveness from God since he knew he was a deadman soon. It's up to the viewer to decide whether or not this act of redemption was good enough to send him to everlasting bliss, or was it a little too late after living a degenerate life of crime and corruption, and now he is damned to Hell. I thought of this, what if the Dodgers won game 7? Would he then have followed through with letting them go, or would he have booked them? We don't know for sure if the bookie would have even honored his bet, but he doesn't know that, and he seems like the type that would expect the bookie to honor the bet. I don't think he was really sorry, and instead he was a man who saw no way out from his impending death since the Mets won, so his act of forgiveness was disingenuous and just a last second saving grace attempt. He was a lousy cop, a lousy husband, a lousy father, a lousy catholic, a lousy man, a lousy soul, and his last attempt of redemption was lousy. The movie should have been called Lousy Lieutenant. It's still not a good title, but I like the alliteration better.
I wouldn't call this great, but it's not a bad movie in any sense. A little boring sometimes, but then it smacks ya with a scene like the one with the two girls in the car and him jerking off. Holy shit. I won't be forgetting that one. Also, Keital hangs dong in this, and that's pretty Thunder Gun of him.
