Bad Lieutenant is a 1992 American neo-noir crime drama film directed by Abel Ferrara, from a screenplay co-written with Zoë Lund. It stars Harvey Keitel as the title character "bad lieutenant", an unnamed and corrupt New York police officer, who suffers a string of personal and spiritual crises.
The film premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened in the Un Certain Regard section. Due to its graphic violence and drug use, the film was released in the United States with an NC-17 rating. Despite limited theatrical distribution, it was praised by critics and has become one of Ferrara's best-known works. Martin Scorsese named this movie as one of the best movies of the entire 1990s.</blockquote>
Lund avowed in an interview that she "co-directed" several scenes in the film. Lund also claimed that she wrote the screenplay of Bad Lieutenant alone and believed that Ferrara did not put much effort in his contributions in the film.
According to Jonas Mekas, Lund's ex-boyfriend Edouard de Laurot was reported to have written most of the film's script. Mekas even claimed he had "scribbles and notes to prove it".
Ferrara said in 2012 that he was using drugs during the making of the film: <blockquote>The director of that film needed to be using, the director and the writer—not the actors.</blockquote>
The Special Edition DVD from Lions Gate has a special feature about the pre-, during, and post-production of the film, in which Ferrara explains the screenplay's genesis, its authorship, and its original brevity.
Christopher Walken was originally going to portray the titular character, having previously worked with Ferrera on King of New York.
Alternate versions
Originally rated NC-17 and one of the few films to be rated thus on the basis of depictions of drug use and violence (the only other film being Comfortably Numb), the unedited cut's rating was described as being for "sexual violence, strong sexual situations and dialogue, graphic drug use".
Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, the largest video rental companies in the United States, had a policy prohibiting the purchase and rental of NC-17 films. An R-rated cut was created specifically so that Blockbuster and the other retailers would rent and purchase out the film. The R-rated cut was described with "drug use, language, violence, and nudity". The scene in which the Lieutenant pulls over two young girls and masturbates in front of them is almost completely absent from the Blockbuster version.
The original theatrical version featured the song "Signifying Rapper" by Schoolly D. The song was removed from some editions of the film's home video release due to the unauthorized use of a re-recorded guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir", which the rapper did not license.
Ban in Ireland
On January 29, 1993, the film was banned in Ireland. Sheamus Smith, who headed the Irish Film Censor's Office at the time, felt "the viewing of it would tend, by reason of the inclusion in it of obscene or indecent matter, to deprave or corrupt persons who might view it". The DVD release was banned for the same reason 10 years later.
Reception
Bad Lieutenant has a 77% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 53 reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Bad Lieutenant will challenge less desensitized viewers with its depiction of police corruption, but Harvey Keitel's committed performance makes it hard to turn away." Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Ferrara's talent for making "gleefully down-and-dirty films", continuing, "He has come up with his own brand of supersleaze, in a film that would seem outrageously, unforgivably lurid if it were not also somehow perfectly sincere." Desson Howe for The Washington Post called the Lieutenant "a notch nicer than Satan", and he cites Keitel's work as the film's saving grace, "It is only the strength of Keitel's performance that gives his personality human dimension."
Mark Kermode has mentioned that the film was praised as "a powerful tale of redemptive Catholicism". Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and stated that "in the Bad Lieutenant, Keitel has given us one of the great screen performances in recent years". Martin Scorsese named this movie as the fifth best movie of the 1990s.
Followups
A narratively unrelated follow-up, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, was released in 2009, seventeen years after the first film's release. The film was directed by Werner Herzog and stars Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes. Herzog claimed it was "not a remake...It's like I keep saying, 'A James Bond film, the newest one, is not a remake of the previous one; it's a completely different story.'" Both films were produced by Edward R. Pressman.
In April 2025, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo was announced to be in production by Neon with Takashi Miike directing.