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Bad Lieutenant is like Mean Streets gone to rot, with the same manic energy fueled by rock ’n’ roll and narcotics, another story of New York City, Catholic guilt, and starring Harvey Keitel. Between the two, I think Scorsese’s opus of morally confused hoods is greater, but that doesn’t mean Bad Lieutenant is a slouch or fails to carry its own merits. It’s more like the sense of “more is more” can hit overload and fail to be shocking, winding up being dull in spots.
After a few moments in this man’s company, it’s very clear that he’s plunging through the numerous circles of hell with boulders tied to both ankles. By the time we’ve seen him ingest a copious amount of drugs, mess around with several hookers, and then sexually assaulting a teenager on the job, which may have been the moment I went “OK, I get it, he’s bad,” we know that there’s no real room for redemption in this life. Maybe in the next one, as Bad Lieutenant is equally mired in Catholicism as it is in relishing its exploitation bonafides.
After a while, watching the film gleefully view various despicable acts while butting heads with deeply religious imagery, it begins to dull its own impact. It’s envelope pushing just for the sake of it in spots, which is boring if there’s no deeper reasoning behind it. Yet Keitel’s committed and deeply felt performance works hard to effectively smooth over these various transitions, he always tries to find the heart and soul of this man in freefall, even if the film isn’t entirely sure or even bothered with the actual presence of those things. It does become harder to care about someone who is written as being anti-human, yet Keitel manages to make us invest our time and empathy with this man.
The fact that the film wants to play for redemption, but on its own black-hearted terms is admirable. There’s clearly no way for this guy to be redeemed, and he consistently seems on the edge of dying. How he goes could have ended up in several different ways – overdose, random act of violence, suicide, target of a hit. It doesn’t matter which, his life is too bleak for any light to shine through. And while I may have had some problems with many stylistic choices that the films made, one cannot argue with the fact that it played by the rules of its world from the first frame to the last. It’s a complete vision, not a pretty one, but a complete one.
