”It’s my lucky crack pipe. You don’t have a lucky crack pipe?”
Abel Ferrera’s original Bad Lieutenant was a gritty, unflinching portrayal of a corrupt cop with themes of Catholic guilt and uneasy redemption. Harvey Keitel played the unnamed titular character with an uncompromising bravery in depicting the Lieutenant’s disturbing demons. Werner Herzog claims to have not been aware of the original film and his version is neither a remake nor a reboot. The script was written by William M. Finkelstein whose credits include a number of television shows such as L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, and…Cop Rock. Under the unwieldy title of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, Herzog crafts a film that isn’t so much disturbing as it is an oddball black comedy hinged around the human medical experiment known as Nicolas Cage.
Cage’s eccentric, idiosyncratic performances have been both lauded and blasted by critics. At his insistence, he ate a live cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss (it was supposed to be a raw egg) and his ”Not the bees!” act in the Wicker Man remake has become popular YouTube fodder. Here, Herzog manages to harness the innate weirdo in Cage into a calculated craziness that is utterly compelling.
”What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?”
Cage is Terence McDonagh, a police detective in New Orleans shortly after the city was savaged by Hurricane Katrina. During the storms, he rescued (though after much debate) a prisoner trapped in his cell as the water rose dangerously high. McDonagh suffers a back injury that leaves him addicted to painkillers and other drugs. It’s highly doubtful, however, that he was that nice of a guy before the injury. Awarded a medal and promoted to lieutenant, McDonagh is put in charge of a homicide case where a Senegalese family was murdered by local drug dealer Big Fate (rapper Xzibit). When he’s not investigating, McDonagh is stealing narcotics from the evidence room and suffers from addled hallucinations of iguanas. He’s deep in gambling debts and inadvertently pisses off a vengeful mobster. When McDonagh is investigating the case, he strong arms a wheelchair-bound, old lady by cutting off her respirator and waving a .44 Magnum in her face. One night, he rousts a pair of club kids and finds a miniscule amount of drugs on their person. He forces the boyfriend to watch as he smokes crack and bangs his girlfriend on the hood of his unmarked police car.
McDonagh has a high-class prostitute girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes), who he eventually hides out with his father. Dad (Tom Bower) is a recovering alcoholic who lives with his ever-soused wife (Jennifer Coolidge) in a mansion in the woods. On the outside, the home is like something out of a Tennessee Williams play, but inside it has all the dark, gloomy charm of a double-wide trailer.
”Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing.”
Cage is at his bug-eyed best in Bad Lieutenant. He lumbers about in a stooped stride like he’s the love child of Dirty Harry and Quasimodo. His voice sometimes drifts into a high-pitched tone similar to the Pokey-inspired voice Cage put on in Peggy Sue Got Married. McDonagh is an ugly human being perfectly at home in the underbelly of a city still struggling to rebuild following a devastating natural disaster. While Cage goes as over-the-top as he possibly can, he’s balanced out by the understated performances of Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer as a fellow detective, and classic character actor Brad Dourif as McDonagh’s pony-tailed bookie.
Herzog adds a surreal touch to the picture with a reptilian fetish that includes a strange, yet haunting, scene at a traffic accident with a gator lying in the middle of the road with its intestines on the asphalt and a single leg twitching. There’s also an interlude of extreme close-ups of iguanas set to Johnny Adams’ “Release Me.”
Port of Call is at its weakest during the third act. The film’s resolution comes out of left field with its happily-ever-after denouement. Everything seems to end for the better and you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is this a happy ending or another one of McDonagh’s crack-induced fever dreams? Honestly, the story is secondary to watching Nic Cage at his Nic Cage-iest.
Rating: ** ½
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