Bad Lieutenant: The Remake

That's one movie I never thought would get remade.

Here's a plot summary of the original, courtesy of the IMDB:

A police Lieutenant goes about his daily tasks of investigating homicides, but is more interested in pursuing his vices. He has accumulated a massive debt betting on baseball, and he keeps doubling to try to recover. His bookies are beginning to get agitated. The Lieutenant does copious amounts of drugs, cavorts with prostitutes, and uses his status to take advantage of teenage girls. While investigating a nun's rape, he begins to reflect on his lifestyle.

Here's the basic plot as I remember it: Harvey Keitel plays a cop who witnesses many bad people doing bad things, but he himself is also a bad person who does bad things. As he investigates a very bad crime and the badness of his bad behaviour escalates, he becomes an even badder person, until the final twist at the end when he does something that is either very, very bad or kinda good, depending on how you look at it. Then he dies.

He's badder than The Bad Seed, badder than Bad Santa (or Badder Santa) and badder than both the Bad Boys put together. He does more bad things than the cast of Very Bad Things, he's a badder influence than the entire cast of Bad Influence, and he dispenses with the Good while going straight for the Bad and the Ugly.

He's just that bad.

Imagine The Bad News Bears being molested by the Big Bad Wolf on the set on Michael Jackson's Bad, and you get some sense of just how bad the Bad Lieutenant is.

Depressing and repetitive is how I remember the film. It makes Todd Solondz' "Happiness" look like a Hope and Crosby road movie. Not exactly the sort of thing that usually gets made in Hollywood, let alone gets made twice.

German director Werner Herzog will be behind the camera, and even more surprising is the A-list cast the remake is attracting: Nicolas Cage, Val Kilmer, and Eva Mendes have already signed on.

Now word yet on whether there'll be a cameo appearance by Harvey Keitel's penis.