`BAD LIEUTENANT' VERGES ON BEING SHOCK THEATER

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 17, 1993                   TAG: 9304170146
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RUSSELL SMITH KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`BAD LIEUTENANT' VERGES ON BEING SHOCK THEATER
In offended droves, they walked out on "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" and "Reservoir Dogs." From "Bad Lieutenant," they will run.
Deserving of its NC-17 rating, this audacious, extreme movie serves up one blasphemous and profane image after another to make a religious point - one, oddly enough, of a true believer. It's a strange, jarring picture, flamboyantly directed by Abel Ferrara.
Example: The scene in which a nun is raped and a church desecrated, intercut with a living image of Christ agonizing on the cross, plays like a loud, frenetic rock video. The shock value is high, but not as gratuitous as it seems when you consider the criminals' youth and America's MTV values.
These are lost boys, though no more so than the cop on the case. As the movie begins, the lieutenant, as Harvey Keitel's character is identified, is a soul in free fall, plummeting toward the ninth circle at breakneck speed.
Within the movie's first 15 minutes, the New York police officer with a family in the 'burbs snorts enough coke and smokes enough crack to kill three rock stars. His gambling debt to mobsters is climbing ominously high, while his fate hangs on the outcome of the World Series.
The plight of the defiled nun (Frankie Thorn) is but an annoying distraction to the lieutenant. There are plenty of rape victims, he argues, so why all the fuss because one happened to be wearing "a penguin suit"? The Church he calls "a racket." And yes, he is a Catholic.
"Bad Lieutenant" explores to the depths the concept of divine forgiveness that characterizes Christianity and, in particular, Catholicism. How low can one go and still find redemption?
The corrupt cop gets way down there. A sickening scene in which he sexually demeans two scared young girls is about as ugly an episode as you're likely to see on screen, complete with pornographic dialogue. And there's more where that came from.
Few name actors would dare take on a role that so spends the good will of the audience. This is, in the end, a story of redemption, but, until that point, it's a horrific wallow in depravity.
Keitel's performance is impressive, and, when the director goes over the top, the actor isn't afraid to go right along with him. The lieutenant is not evil, but a pathetic creature, stricken with all the weakness of a world in need of salvation. Keitel plays him ashen, dead-eyed, stony of face and barren of spirit.
While much of "Bad Lieutenant" verges on shock theater, the film doesn't merit summary dismissal on such grounds. Its intentions are serious, even profound - a tough, gritty meditation on the street-level implications of sin and salvation.
Love it or hate it, if you don't walk out, it's hard to turn away.
\ Bad Lieutenant: Showing at The Grandin Theatre in Roanoke. Rated NC-17 for language, sex, nudity, drugs, violence - all in the extreme.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB