Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
While investigating a young nun's rape, a corrupt New York City police detective, with a serious drug and gambling addiction, tries to change his ways and find forgiveness.
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What critics compared Bad Lieutenant to
Adapted (and softened) from the 1998 Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, Filth combines the sleaze of Bad Lieutenant with the gauche giddiness of Dom Hemingway , eventually metastasizing into a desperate movie about a desperate man.
Filth is bolstered by a gonzo performance from McAvoy, who seems determined to out-Bad Lieutenant the American Bad Lieutenants; like his Yankee counterparts Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage, he even does a scene where he coaxes sexual favors while on duty.
A self-serving Detective Sergeant in the Lothian constabulary, Bruce makes Bad Lieutenant look like a virginal vicar as he shags, snorts and schemes his way around Edinburgh, feeding his out-of-control addictions and monstrous libido.
Close cousins to Filth are In Bruges and Werner Herzog’s re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant, both of which had moral vacuums for main characters and were similarly contented in their carefree depiction of sex, violence and hardcore drug-use.
Think of a more psychedelic version of Bad Lieutenant – one that nearly borders on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and you’ll be in the right cognitive space.
In making the results of a playoff series a life-and-death matter for an in-too-deep gambler, Uncut Gems owes not a little to 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, a film by another New York moviemaker distinguished by his commitment to capturing the tonality of the city—Abel Ferrara, who turned in a cameo in the Safdies’ 2009 Daddy Longlegs.
So, with a mix of guts and resourcefulness, the film rips a page out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love playbook and leans into certain Sandlerisms—primarily the idea of a loud, abrasive man-child without a behavioral filter—while placing them in a discombobulating new dramatic and artistic context, like Billy Madison remade as Abel Ferrara’s neo-exploitation classic Bad Lieutenant.
If Good Time , which you can view on Amazon Prime, had something of the feel of Dog Day Afternoon , Uncut Gems made me think of Bad Lieutenant, the pugnacious 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a not-nice police officer, memorably played by Harvey Keitel, and his attempts to survive his gambling addiction during a New York Mets playoff run.
In his own way, Phoenix is reminiscent of Harvey Keitel’s anonymous awful cop in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, only instead of pure id, Joe manifests his trauma as a hulking lump of sentient meat, rage channeled into a new hammer he picks up at a random hardware store during his latest quest to recover a Senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov).
Of all the movies to follow the Bad formula — a collection that includes Bad Grandpa, Bad Teacher, Bad Santa, and that has somehow retroactively enveloped Abel Ferrara’s not-like-the-others 1992 Bad Lieutenant — Bad Moms clearly features the lowest standards for what constitutes misbehavior.
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Merrimen plans to rob the LA branch of the Federal Reserve, and Nick—otherwise beset by classic Bad Lieutenant (a phrase uttered perhaps unironically in this film) vices like drug abuse and alcoholism, etc., as well as a wife (Dawn Olivieri, last seen as “wife” in Bright) who wants to divorce him because he’s a horrible person—wants to stop that theft from happening.
There’s a whisper of Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant in so many scenes you’d think that director’s finger was on the trigger.
Whether gurning through Bad Lieutenant or the simply bad The Wicker Man , he’s a reliably entertaining presence – even if the material frequently plops in what was once called the straight-to-video bin.
If you thought Cage had found his greatest enabler in shoe-?eating iconoclast Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), Cosmatos has done the German director one better: he’s created a film crazier than Cage is, rendering his performance completely in sync with the nightmare world surrounding him.
There is torture involved, not to mention a young girl witnessing the death of her father (and Cage still has the afterglow of his "Bad Lieutenant" performance here).
Sam Rockwell’s racist, dullard Dixon, Ebbings’ answer to “Bad Lieutenant,” is a focal point in the film.
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If Herzog directed, he could have cranked up the absurdity to a Bad Lieutenant level.
A bemused Bruce Willis and a sputtering Tracy Morgan belly-flop through territory already covered with far more wit and better fart jokes in Hot Fuzz and Herzogs Bad Lieutenant reboot.