Keitel plays a bad cop, a really bad cop, a lost soul. What vices are there? He has them. He ignores his family, sexually exploits hookers, takes dope from dealers instead of arresting them, shakes down criminals and lets them go, plays peeping tom with a nun, sexually exploits young girls that he stops for traffic violations, gambles, cheats the gamblers, uses crack, mainlines heroin, drinks constantly, is a racist, and calls Christ a "ratfuck" in Church.

Does that about cover it?

He simply can't grasp that a nun, raped violently on the church altar, won't identify her assailants, although she definitely knows them. She understands their pain. She has forgiven them.

Can this corrupted man find a piece of his soul in the heart of the nun?

TOTAL SPOILERS:

I don't know, but in an ambiguous ending, Keitel figures out who did it, and instead of roughing them up or turning them in, he puts them safely on a bus out of town and tells them they're dead if they return. Then he sits in his car waiting for the gamblers to kill him for his outrageous debts.

END SPOILERS:

Does it sound like your kind of ugly, gritty, cinema verité movie? If so, it is a good one. Roger Ebert awarded four stars and praised Harvey Keitel's performance, as well as the film's gritty realism and moral complexity.

Personally, I hate it.

• The Lieutenant doesn't stay in character when he's dealing with the nun. If I were a cop who cuts corners, I would have found a way to make the friggin' nun understand that the fact of her having forgiven the rapists is not relevant to whether she should turn them in. I would have taken her to the morgue and shown her a dead 12 year old girl and told her that the girl seems to have been brutally raped and killed by the same guys, and that the nun could have prevented it by turning the guys right in. And then I'd tell her that left behind a note saying they plan to rape and torture a virgin every day. And then I would have said, "do you know who raped and killed that girl? Not those deranged monsters who have no control over their impulses, sister, but you. You did this to her by leaving them on the streets. You may forgive them, sister, but this little girl's parents aren't ready to forgive you."  And then, for emphasis, I would stress that the upcoming crimes are expected to happen in the neighborhood where the nun's nieces and little sisters live, on the streets where they play with their puppies. It would have all been lies on my part, but completely in character for the Keitel cop, and those lies would have made the nun sing like Sister Sourire.

• Talk about slow pacing. This movie is only 96 minutes long, and could be cut by another 20 minutes without losing anything. Literally. There must be ten full minutes of explicitly detailed drug use, and another ten of Keitel nodding off on camera. If you don't know how to use the latest drugs (well, in 1992, anyway), here's where you can get some tips. These scenes drag on and on and on pointlessly. I drifted off to sleep a couple times watching this, but if nodding off is your favorite spectator sport, this movie is your Superbowl.

• Yes, Keitel's performance is as good as everyone has said, but so what? Are you going to watch a movie to see a demonstration of acting technique?

• Yes, the action has the gritty feel of complete realism, like one of those real-life cop shows. So give director Abel Herrera an A for technique, but watch something else.