1999

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
LIONSGATE
RELEASED 7 May 2010
Nick Cage has been on a roll now for quite a few years, appearing in one film after another where he overacts and hams it up do a degree that is surely now self-parody. And this time is no different, except this time he’s directed by Werner Herzog. The legendary German director of such films as Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Herzog has managed to get a performance out of Cage that while over the top, is right for the film. Whether this was Herzog’s intention is unclear, but he uses the acting of the later day Cage to the full advantage of the plot.
Cage’s cop Terrance sustains a back injury while rescuing an inmate during Hurricane Katrina and the drugs he’s on after this point leads him down the road to become the bad lieutenant of the title. The other characters are really one-dimensional clichés, from Val Kilmer’s other bad cop to Eva Mendes’s heart-of-gold prostitute to Terrence’s ex-cop father who is drinking himself to death. The only joy in this film is from Cage’s character but it’s not really clear if Cage is doing this knowingly or whether Herzog is using this trait of his to parody the genre.
The whole film feels like Herzog is having a laugh, going far beyond over-the-top into drug-induced visions invading the consciousness of the character, to setting up the clichés and allowing them play out for his own amusement.
The weird thing about all of this is that it’s so damn entertaining. The plot is really secondary and continues with clichéd drug pushers and tertiary characters, but Herzog’s crazy direction choices, ranging from suddenly moving to hand-held to show us the lizards that Terrence is imagining during a stakeout to the break-dancing soul of a dead blackmailer, are what really makes this film worth watching. He knows this genre is clichéd-ridden, that Nick Cage is a parody of his former self, but he uses those to push the film to the precipice and then over.
This film has nothing to do with Abel Ferrara’s dark original that featured Harvey Kietel as the bad cop with Catholic guilt. This is wholly Herzog’s and in Nick Cage he has found a leading man much like Klaus Kinski, who used to permeate his films with the craziness that can be found here, taking the character all the way over the edge and showing us just what someone will do for their next fix PAUL FORRESTER
THREE OUT OF FIVE