Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 122 m, 2009
Directed by Werner Herzog. Stars Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, et al.

When writer, director, and all-around pain-in-the-neck Abel Ferrara learned that Bad Lieutenant, his 1992 portrait of an emotionally exhausted and spiritually bankrupt flatfoot, was going to be remade by Werner Herzog with Nicolas Cage in the titular role, he implored our Heavenly Father to snuff them out in a streetcar explosion and then cast their wayward souls into the lake of fire and brimstone. I, for one, was not at all surprised by Ferrara’s reaction; he has a long history of making the kind of inflammatory statements that can move the ink-stained wretches into doing the happiest of happy dances. (He’s a rough-cut, foul-spoken provocateur—the cinema’s answer to Charles Bukowski.) Ferrara fancies himself a maverick, but those of us who’ve actually been subjected to his vulgar tirades have a hard time seeing him as anything other than a prick. And it’s downright hilarious to think of him disparaging Herzog because Herzog is an artist who truly marches to the beat of his own drum and could have this poseur for lunch. After all, Herzog has given the world such vital pictures as Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Rescue Dawn, whereas Ferrara’s résumé consists largely of stinking waste like The Driller Killer and Ms. 45. It seems that Ferrara’s potty mouth is the only thing keeping him in the public eye these days, though it’s hard to tell if his tantrums are calculated or if he’s every bit the scummy human being that his pictures suggest. (He’s certainly immature: His input on the commentary track of the King of New York DVD was so shallow and crude that I had to stop listening to it after only five minutes in.) I liked Bad Lieutenant a lot, but if I had God’s ear, I’d ask him to let Ferrara perish in that burning tram before Herzog or Cage—both geniuses of their respective crafts. Ferrara’s anger with them isn’t justified, anyway: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is not a remake. (I’m not sure if it can even be called a sequel.) Yes, Cage’s crooked cop and the one played by Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant share a penchant for drugs and gambling, but the environments they inhabit and the personal journeys upon which they embark are quite different. And whereas Ferrara’s original was persistently dour and virtually humorless, Herzog’s version is lively, offbeat, and funny as all get-out.

I admit it: I’m just crackers about Cage. Ever since he starred in John Dahl’s 1993 neo-noir sleeper, Red Rock West, I’ve been his number one fan. And I’ll watch him in anything, whether it’s a mindless action flick like Con Air or a Capraesque romantic comedy like The Family Man or an unwieldy prestige picture like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I even find Cage’s less enthusiastically received efforts (Bangkok Dangerous, The Wicker Man) enjoyable because, well, he’s in them. But I truly, madly, deeply crush on Cage whenever he plays a character with a big hump on his back: the suicidal drunk in Leaving Las Vegas, the sleep-deprived paramedic in Bringing Out the Dead, the obsessive-compulsive con artist in Matchstick Men, etc. Cage is always at his best when he’s allowed to go as far out as his little heart desires, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans affords him just such an opportunity—and then some. The lawman he plays, New Orleans homicide investigator Terence McDonagh, uses all sorts of legal and illegal substances to help ease the pain of a terrible back injury, so Cage not only gets to affect a lopsided posture and a halting gait, he also gets to lay on a bunch of weird ticks that grow even weirder the closer his character comes to a drug-induced flip-out. When Cage is on, as he most definitely is here, few actors can touch him. In fact, I don’t think any of his contemporaries have the stuff to pull off this number with the nearly perfect pitch that he does. (Certainly not Sean Penn; he’d just turn McDonagh into a whiny jerk-off.) We should hate McDonagh because he does such awful, unethical things, but Cage makes him so funny that we can’t help but root the guy on. Whereas Keitel’s performance in Bad Lieutenant was something of a death march, Cage spends his time in this far more enjoyable policier jigging around the lip of lunacy. Ferrara laid into Cage for having the cheek to step into Keitel’s gumshoes, but Cage is a far more imaginative actor than Keitel (who, let’s face it, can be a bit repetitive) and he doesn’t have to wave his cock in our faces to convince us of his “fearlessness.”

Though he doesn’t start out particularly bad, McDonagh comes to make To Live and Die in L.A.’s Richard Chance look like a man of the cloth by comparison. (And yet even the most naughty things he does seem like child’s play when weighed against what Dennis Peck was doing in Internal Affairs.) Shortly after Katrina has pounded the bejesus out of his fair city, McDonagh rescues a suspect from a flooded jail cell, sacrificing an expensive pair of Swiss cotton underpants in the process. He also sacrifices a few of his vertebrae, which earns him a promotion to lieutenant, as well as a prescription for Vicodin. But when the government-approved dope fails to put the kibosh on his cries and whimpers, he turns to smoking grass, snorting coke, huffing Krylon Fusion for Plastic® spray paint—you name it. Of course, being a member of the Big Easy’s finest lets him have access to that holiest of holies, the property room, where there’s enough primo shit on hand to keep Hunter S. Thompson in clover for a fortnight. But when the powers that be grow suspicious and start setting up cameras everywhere, McDonagh resorts to shaking down the johns who frequent his hooker girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes, who co-starred with Cage in Ghost Rider). Eventually, he rips off the wrong man—a man with (uh-oh) Mob ties. And now McDonagh has a bunch of greasy goombahs on his tail, demanding he pay fifty large in restitution—or else. Yeah, as if McDonagh has that kind of scratch; he’s already into his bookie, Ned (Brad Dourif), for five dimes. Still, if he doesn’t want to go the way of all flesh, he’s going to have to strike it rich lickety-split, which means moonlighting as a salesman for The Encyclopedia Britannica is probably out of the question. As the superb trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans warns us, “Sometimes one bad thing leads to another and another and another.”

Once McDonagh gets a taste of how Old Scratch does things, he enthusiastically rides the express to you-know-where, cackling all the way. (And the deeper he goes, the more his face morphs into that of a demon’s.) In Bad Lieutenant, Keitel’s nameless officer was a lapsed Catholic who sought redemption while investigating the rape of a nun (I’ve never been able to shake off that weird shot of a crucified Christ screaming to Heaven as his young bride suffered the ultimate indignity), and while McDonagh’s case is even heavier, it doesn’t try his soul like the original BL’s did. Still, he’s committed to finding out who whacked an entire family of illegal Senegalese immigrants, even if it means wiping his ass with the Constitution. As it turns out, the father may have inadvertently put his brood in jeopardy by dealing heroin in a part of town run by an infamous drug kingpin known as Big Fate (very well played by rapper Xzibit), and everybody knows that stepping on Big Fate’s turf is even dumber than messing around with Slim. Ordinarily, the fuzz couldn’t care less about some lowlife pusher with pennies on his eyes, but since innocent women and children were offed “execution-style” along with him, they’re not going to rest until the evildoers are brought to justice. And it’s a lot of fun to watch McDonagh and his partner, Stevie (Val Kilmer), in the box as they try to sweat Big Fate’s lackeys. Unfortunately, that gets them nowhere fast; not even the hardest of yardbirds has the cojones to roll over on Big Fate. But, fear not, our titular antihero has thought up a way to bring down Big Fate and satisfy his debt to the Mafia in the process.

Well, his plan doesn’t quite work out (it all goes to shit, quite frankly), but in the end, McDonagh still comes out smelling like a magnolia blossom. (And all Keitel’s poor copper got for his constant self-flagellation was a bullet in the head.) To be sure, the It’s a Wonderful Life-style moment McDonagh is treated to in the show’s last act is absurd, but I’d expect nothing less from Herzog, a terrific ironist. Everything he does here couldn’t be more unconventional, and he’s assembled a top-notch cast and crew to help realize his quirky vision. But ultimately Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans belongs to Cage. His character appears to have an underdeveloped conscience, and the manner in which he abuses his power is often sick. How sick? Well, when a crippled, old woman refuses to tell him what he wants to know, he pinches off her breathing tube. Or when a young couple pleads with him to not bust them for possession, he gives in only after smoking the girl’s crack and then screwing her in front of her boyfriend. Too much junk and too little sleep is causing McDonagh to go nuts, and the nuttier he gets, the more he starts to sound like Andy Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton. That’s sort of interesting because I’ve always found Cage to bear a strong resemblance to Kaufman, and if I had been permitted my druthers back in the day, he would’ve played Kaufman in Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon. Look, I think Jim Carrey was just fine in the part, but the picture would’ve succeeded in lassoing that moon had it starred Cage. He’s to the movies what Kaufman was to standup: a true risk-taker seemingly indifferent to what audiences think. Herzog has been cast from that mold, too: In one scene, McDonagh instructs a gunman to put another slug into his already deader than dead victim. “What for?” the shooter asks. “His soul’s still dancing,” McDonagh tells him before erupting into a maniacal laugh that would give the Joker a chill. And then, I kid you not, we see the dead man’s soul dancing. But it’s not doing the Charleston or the Shag or the Turkey Trot. No, it’s fucking breakdancing! Yup, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is that kind of film. I loved it. 

May 31, 2010 

© Copyright 2010 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.