Hide your stash -- the Lieutenant is headed back out on the streets. And he's just as bad as you remember him. If not worse.
When writer-director Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" was released in 1992, the grim drama that starred Harvey Keitel as the most spiritually anguished, nakedly self-destructive cop in New York City polarized viewers and left a scorching mark in independent film. It was nominated for best feature at the Film Independent's Spirit Awards, and Keitel's legendary raw performance won him the Spirit for best male lead and a slot in the unofficial acting hall of fame.
Veteran producer Edward R. Pressman ("Badlands," "American Psycho"), who developed and produced the first movie, is poised to revisit the Lieutenant and "try to reinvent the film in a way that would be relevant again," as he puts it. So earlier this year one of his co-producers, Stephen Belafonte (the new Mr. Scary Spice), brought in Billy Finkelstein, a Flushing, Queens-bred TV writer whose deep cops-and-criminals résumé is a hit list of street cred: "L.A. Law," "Murder One," "Law & Order" and "NYPD Blue."
The new version -- with a working title of "Bad Lieutenant '08" -- is less a sequel or a prequel than an attempt to take the raw material of the original film and weave it into 21st century, post- 9/11 New York. In the draft I have, dated July 24, 2007, Finkelstein provides the Lieutenant with a small amount of addiction back story, the event that prompts his promotion from sergeant and the drug-related murder of five Senegalese illegal immigrants to pursue.
He has also given his tortured protagonist, who went nameless in the first film, a name: Terence McDonough. Meanwhile, the familiar relentless tear of reckless drug-taking, gambling, stealing and sex continues unabated.
The original film was rated NC-17 -- a rating that was still new and provocative at the time -- and justifiably, given not just its sexual violence, drug abuse and nudity, but also its punishing emotional brutality. The question is: What will the Bad Lieutenant do with more money and looser standards to play with? And is it possible to have the same effect?
"We have to factor in the passage of time and what's happened in the interim," says Finkelstein, who has yet to write in an updated nod to Keitel's full-frontal, drug-addled glory. "I don't know that the same sorts of things that caused us to sit up and take notice 15 years ago are necessarily gonna have the same effect now."
