Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Nicolas Cage has committed such heinous sins against the actor's craft that he's practically self-condemned himself to that special purgatory reserved for high-priced washouts: Making movie after movie that might easily go direct-to-DVD, were his name not featured prominently on the one-sheet. It's a sorry fate for a guy who once enjoyed untouchable status as a risk-taking wunderkind, someone whose attenuated mania fired up mainstream romantic comedy (Moonstruck, Peggy Sue Got Married) and the Coen Brothers at their Loony Tooniest (Raising Arizona).

That history makes Cage's turn in Werner Herzog's not-really-a-remake of/sequel to Bad Lieutenant exceptionally resonant. The movie, whether you're talking about Abel Ferrara's 1982 cult classic or this more recent variation on its themes, is about redemption. It's also about crazy.

Cage, an actor whose juju evaporated years ago in a haze of crappy, multimillion-dollar paydays, needed the former and has a surplus of the latter. Herzog, though more widely appreciated these days for his documentaries, became world-famous with a life-threatening five-film run in the 1970s and '80s with madman actor Klaus Kinski. But the German has suffered some lost juju, as well, at least in regard to narrative features. He never found an alter ego to match his departed "best fiend" Kinski. But Cage proves nutty enough for the job, taking the lead in a movie whose full title – Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans– is as ungainly as its execution is eccentric.

Ties to Ferrara's movie are loose. Cage's character, like Harvey Keitel's before him, is a recklessly effective detective working the dark side of an urban turf, a man whose addictive nature sucks him into a vortex of drugs, gambling, sex and violence. The similarities end about there, and we can thank Herzog for that, as well as for transforming what could have been a slapdash gig-for-hire into inspired, entertaining lunacy. The director wades deep into the swampy funk of New Orleans, which in this post-Katrina setting might as well be an end-of-the-world movie. Herzog's appetite for extreme geographies is thoroughly sated here. He's clearly turned on by the weirdness, the casual corruption, the gangsterism and the Southern Gothic outrageousness of the place.

This is still the Amazon-trekking jungle rat who once declared America to be the most exotic place on earth, and he doesn't have to look very far to justify that assessment on location in Louisiana. On an occasion or two, his camera wanders away from the action to assume the perspective of an iguana or an alligator, observing human behavior with the dispassionate eye of nature. It may seem silly, but it also suggests that perhaps the real exotic beasts are the ones with the dialogue. Such an attitude appears to give Cage permission to be his old, whacked-out self again. Aping a Richard III slump, the actor plays a once-decent cop whose back injury has led to an addiction to painkillers. And cocaine. And heroin. And everything else. He's got a high-end hooker girlfriend (Eva Mendes), a gambling debt, and a symbiotic relationship with a drug kingpin (Xzibit) he may or may not be setting up.

The film is 90 percent riffage: Cage freestyling raps, threatening elderly invalids by cutting off their oxygen, using his badge to harass wayward party girls into giving him coke and blowjobs, breaking out his "lucky crack pipe" and going to that secret place that Dennis Hopper went to in Blue Velvet. Throw in the terrific casting of oddball character parts (Brad Dourif! Jennifer Coolidge!), sudden blasts of gonzo ethnography (the soundtrack is a marvel of obscure gospel and blues numbers), and pulpy one-liners ("Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing!") and it's all as hard to resist as one of Cage's on-screen coke binges.

It will be more interesting to watch Bad Lieutenant: POCNO now that David Simon has launched his new, NOLA-centric HBO series Treme. The catastrophic impact that Katrina made on the Crescent City has had the profoundly ironic effect of turning it into a readymade backdrop for Hollywood. The media has applauded Simon for embracing the "real" New Orleans, but I'll be surprised if anyone comes close to the hyperventilated hoodoo it inspired in Herzog and Cage anytime soon.