review: Bad Lieutenant

 

(Five out of Five Stars)

 

 

Harvey Keitel goes to a place in this film that few actors would dare to visit, and even fewer would have the capacity to report back from if they were able to get there. At some moments in this film, Keitel is performing with a look in his eye that convinces you that he is not acting at all… he has become The Lieutenant. This film is about our ability to manufacture our own hell, the increasing difficulty in forgiving ourselves as we delve deeper and deeper into desperation, and the need of even the most disenchanted and misplaced souls to find a savior in a world that is full of temptation. In the wake of investigating the violation of purity, Keitel's character reflects upon his own fiendish and chaotic morality and is swept with a revelation that we are all primarily made of appetite, and we are hungry for our own self demise. The Lieutenant is striving to become superman. Not the comic book superman, but Nietzsche’s superman. But as the great philosopher Nietzsche himself warns, “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.” Bad Lieutenant is a grand, must see philosophical revelation.