Bad
Lieutenant
is a film about routine. Know how you get up in the morning and take
a shower and go to work? It’s like that. Except instead of
showering and eating breakfast, it so happens that Nic Cage’s
routine involves snorting vast amounts of narcotics and solving
multiple homicides. For the most part in that order.
So
in fact, like most routines, Bad
Lieutenant
is quite a
repetitious film. I counted four main camera angles used again and
again throughout the movie, plus about three kinds of repeated
character interaction. Let’s count them. Shot one: Nic Cage
pacing a corridor, camera at his back, pistol drawn and pocketing all
the narcotics he sees. Shot two: Nic Cage talking to someone, other
person’s shoulder visible from the right hand corner. Shot three:
Nic Cage driving, camera outside so the light catches the chassis.
Shot four: Nic Cage parked, focused on the object of his attention,
face visible in the interior mirror.
Next
up the modes of interaction. Type one: Nic Cage telling someone he
can fix their problem (be it prostitute girlfriend or drug
dealer boss.) Type two: Nic Cage extorting someone for drugs (be it
his colleagues in the police department or innocent people.) Type
three: Nic Cage taking drugs.
Yep.
Bad
Lieutenant
is composed of not much more than these four angles and three modes
of interaction, repeated throughout. It sounds dull, but the
brilliant thing is that it isn’t in the slightest. Instead, the
film establishes these routines with great care (you’d never notice
them unless you were searching for patterns and structures, which I
was) then hides them in Nic Cage’s performance. Like most of us,
he’s so engrossed in the life he’s living, he doesn’t notice
his patterns until things start to go wrong. So his blatant disregard
for police procedure in order to get things done doesn’t cause
a problem, until he almost asphyxiates a US senator’s mother to get
answers or, for instance, beats up the son of a man that owns half
New Orleans for not paying his prostitute girlfriend.
It’s
brilliant, because in effect the film is about a man striving to
fulfil his aims and responsibilities like the rest of us, but living
life at such a pitch it proves self-destructive. Suffice to comment
this is all treated with tremendous dark humour, and is delicious to
watch.
