[Film] Bad Lieutenants

Contains mild spoilers... Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans is a joke. And I don’t mean that necessarily in a bad way. I mean, that’s the only way to explain it. It’s not a comedy – not exactly – but it’s Herzog’s joke at the expense of Hollywood. It must be. Herzog, of course, is mad. Not mad in the same way that Lars von Trier is mad – not bad mad. He’s just a wild and crazy guy who rails against Bonanza and eats shoes. And now he’s remade one of the most disturbing films of the nineties as a Hollywood pisstake. Unsurprisingly, Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant has very little to do with Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. It has a corrupt, drug-addled cop at the centre of it, but that aside, it's more like a wildly distorted echo than a direct remake. Ferrara’s film is genuinely shocking – still shocking, almost 20 years on. In it a nun is raped by two men. They also use a crucifix. Harvey Keitel’s lieutenant meanwhile is genuinely disturbed. Aside from the drugs, the sex and the gambling, the cursing of Christ and the standing around naked whilst whining like a wounded dog, there is also the infamous masturbation scene, which brings a whole new meaning to the term 'carjacking'. The man is a moral train-wreck and the film as a whole is uncomfortable and difficult. 

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