Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is everything I love about Nicolas Cage movies - exuberantly over-the-top, bafflingly heavy on unsubtle characterization, and riddled with loud bursts of unnecessary shouting.

Werner Herzog insists that this Bad Lieutenant has nothing to do with Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel - it's not a remake, a prequel, a sequel, a midquel, an update, et cetera. Perhaps it's simply a variation on a theme: the bad cop. In any event, Cage is that bad cop, Terrence McDonagh, navigating his way through post-Katrina New Orleans. He's got a prostitute (Eva Mendes) for a lover, a nasty cocaine/Vicodin habit, gambling debts up the wazoo, and persistent hallucinations of iguanas. In the middle of a five-homicide case, McDonagh's life starts spiraling out of control as he crosses the line more times than one can count.

The main attraction at this carnival of movie magic is, of course, Nic Cage. Readers of this blog know that there's a very strange love-hate relationship between Cage and myself; that is, I've been burned on a lot of his movies (The Wicker Man, Next, and Ghost Rider chief among them), but his movies are irresistible. Most of the time they're terrible to the point of being infinitely rewatchable - The Wicker Man, with its shouted epithet of "HOW'D IT GET BURNED?!" and the delightfully campy "Nic Cage in a bear suit punching women" scene, for example - but every once in a while he turns in a star performance. And I'm just not sure which of these Bad Lieutenant is. On the one hand, Cage is McDonagh, unbreakably intense and (according to my father) nearly pitch-perfect in portraying a man suffering from back pain, at least as far as posture is concerned. On the other hand, he does some very strange things in this movie that I couldn't reconcile with really anything I'd seen before; sometimes his drug-addled stupor simply resembles confused myopia, and for twenty minutes his character slips for no apparent reason into a bizarre voice resembling Jimmy Stewart with lockjaw. The other performances are entirely negligible, then, in the wake of this wholly odd character Cage creates.

But win or lose, for better or for worse Cage is entertaining, perpetually on the brink of insanity. Where I've seen Cage phone in performances before (Next, the last third of Lord of War), here he's completely entrenched in the character's shoes, from his slumping shoulders to his unrelenting fearlessness when it comes to cutting loose. I can't count the number of times McDonagh snaps in the film, either hurling profanities at characters who are "in his way" or cackling hysterically after taking hit after hit from a crack pipe. This is Cage at his most unrestrained, but it's certainly not a fantastic film by any stretch of the imagination. It is, simply, fascinatingly bizarre.

Most of that strange quality is Herzog's fault, and I use the word "fault" with all its negative connotations because Herzog's interventions are deliberate, distracting, and detrimental. For starters, the narrative is tangled and fragmented, jumping in episodic format from vignette to vignette with only a loose thread tying it all together. For a fair amount of the second half, McDonagh is pursued by a group of hoodlums, though it's unclear until the last few minutes (at which point it's already too late) who these cats are working for. The most distracting and problematic shots in the film are ones in which Herzog's camera lingers fetishistically on lizards, with iguanas and alligators in particular getting their close-up. These scenes are almost impossible to fit into the narrative of the film - it's implied that the iguanas are hallucinations and therefore represent moments of unreality - and seem overly indulgent, calling attention themselves while grinding the narrative flow to a halt. (Herzog's greatest sin, though, might be his failure to pull Cage aside and ask, "Hey man, what the heck is up with this voice you're doing all of a sudden?"

For one of those "What the heck did I just watch?" movies, this Bad Lieutenant is all good. For high cinema (Ebert put it on his Top Ten of '09 list), I can't say it's a great film. You may, however, find it highly entertaining.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is rated a hard R "for drug use and language throughout, some violence and sexuality." McDonagh abuses pretty much every drug in the book, swears like a sailor (as do other characters), is lovers with a prostitute, and accepts sexual favors as bribes (rear nudity is seen once). Leave the kiddies at home; this ain't National Treasure.