Saw Bad Lieutenant, a grumpy little film about a bad NYC cop. He extorts sexual favors from girls at a traffic stop, he sells drugs to drug dealers right out of their evidence bags. He does coke, crack, meth, and heroin, often in the company of women. Yes sir, he's a baaaaad cop. So what can all of this badness be for? Will he redeem himself in the third act? Will he be the necessary evil that this city needs to function? Or will he just be bad and you just have to deal with it, America. Well, the story takes its time getting to its punchline. It's fairly fun to see this dude be evil. He's clearly not enjoying himself and seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into a despairing hedonism as symbolized by his doubling down again and again on a Mets/Dodgers bet that never seems to pay off. Religious iconography features heavily, implying that the cop is begging to be stopped.
The plot, when it isn't following the cop being bad, is about a nun who is horrifically raped and who then won't name names out of some religious conviction. The bad cop's future is connected more and more intimately with this case as the film progresses. In the end, the film achieves a sort of redemption for the cop, but it's not very satisfying or very convincing. Such is the nature of hard-line religion. What is right is not what is satisfying.
This is a good, juicy morality play. It's not simple, and it's not straightforward, because life is not like that. The unsatisfying climax/ending leaves you something stuck in your craw, to think about for the next few days. A dour but (I think) rewarding film.
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