Review: Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call New Orleans

Friday marks the limited release of one of the best films I caught at TIFF this year, Werner Herzog’s gloriously unhinged Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans starring the gloriously unhinged Nic Cage. Neither a remake nor an homage nor a sequel to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant, Herzog’s film is certainly historically conceptually weird, sharing as a link to Ferrara’s film only the idea of a drug-addicted, corrupt cop as a central character. Herzog reportedly tried to have the “Bad Lieutenant” dropped from his film’s title, and Ferrara reportedly wished that Herzog would die in an explosion.

Cage plays good-cop-turned-bad Terence McDonagh, who descends into corruption and drug addiction after injuring his back during a heroic rescue in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When not spending time with his call-girl girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes), he investigates the death of a family of African immigrants and becomes involved with local drug kingpin Big Fate (Xzibit).

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is the story of a director finding his actor, and vice-versa. Herzog’s career (varied though it’s been) is for many defined by the five films (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde) made in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s with the legendarily volatile actor Klaus Kinski, and in Cage Herzog has finally found an actor that can match Kinski’s vibrating, bizarre intensity. What other pairing of actor and director could in 2009 make a film in which the lead interrupts a tense procedural cop stake-out scene to remark on a pair of non-existent iguanas looking at him from on a coffee-table? Cage is better in this film than he has been in anything in years, maybe a decade or more, and his frazzled, unraveling, wide-eyed glee is used by Herzog in a way that renders it human and real, where it would be scenery-chewing in the hands of almost any other filmmaker. The film is a gloriously weird explosion of creativity bound within the still-somehow-convincing shell of a cop drama. While it lacks the rote good-guy-bad-guy tension and shoot-out thrills of your classic thriller, it more than makes up for that loss with unhinged, weird, maniac creative freedom. I particularly liked the moment when we learn after-the-fact that we’ve been watching a scene from the point of view of a crocodile, for some reason. 8.5/10.