It's difficult to enter into Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans expecting a comedy. That's despite a title more ridiculous and unwieldy than even a CSI spin-off would accept, and a trailer that features star Nicolas Cage waxing rhapsodic on his lucky crack pipe, and instructing some henchmen to shoot a dead body again, because the victim's "soul is still dancing." This has to be meant for laughs, right? The lingering expectation of a gritty drama lies mostly in this film's status as an ostensible remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 cult favorite, the Harvey Keitel tour-de-force Bad Lieutenant, and in Herzog's reputation for dark and sober dramas about outsized obsessive personalities.

But Herzog has been dabbling in comedy for years now, from the silly mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness to his deadpan turn as "The German" in The Grand. That he's finally directing a movie that plays for laughs isn't as out of left field as it might seeam. Also, his Bad Lieutenant can't properly be called a remake of Ferrara's. It can barely be called a re-imagining, taking from its predecessor only the very general concept of a homicide lieutenant with a weakness for nearly every vice imaginable, seeking redemption as he looks to solve a heinous crime against innocents.

From there, Herzog and screenwriter William M. Finkelstein make an entirely different movie, using New Orleans in the early post-Katrina months as the backdrop for a story of drug abuse, gambling, drinking, corruption, and crime, the majority of which is perpetrated by Cage's Lieutenant McDonagh. Cage hasn't spent this much time playing out altered states since Leaving Las Vegas, as he spends the bulk of the movie drunk, or high on cocaine, heroin, or the prescription drugs he takes for the debilitating back injury he suffers at the start of the movie — an injury which serves as the excuse for his downward spiral, and as an opportunity for Cage to lurch around like a hunchback for most of the film.

McDonagh becomes more and more unhinged as the movie progresses, as he owes more and more money to his bookie (the wonderfully slimy Brad Dourif), as his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) gets in trouble with organized criminals, and he fails to make sufficient progress in solving the murder of a family of Senagalese immigrants whose father was involved in the drug trade. Cage, who has made a career in recent years out of his scene-chewing excess, is given free reign by Herzog to play it as over the top as he wants; the result is a performance as deliriously nutso as his manic turn in Wild at Heart. Herzog, no stranger to bringing out the inner maniac in his leading men after so many films with Klaus Kinski, allows Cage to dance right up to the edge of self-mockery, and then tumble right on over.

McDonagh is a parody of not just Cage's own acting in recent years, but a gaudy exaggeration of every bad-cop cliché out there. He carries a massive hand cannon of a revolver tucked constantly front and center in his pants. He nonchalantly steals drugs from club kids and coerces them into sex to avoid arrest. In one particularly memorable scene, he berates an elderly woman in a wheelchair and cuts off the air supply from her oxygen tank. As things move along, he becomes less a parody and more a bizarre cartoon, having hallucinations of iguanas that aren't there, turning up hidden behind doors using an electric razor as he begins impromptu interrogations, and occasionally affecting a nasally accent that almost sounds like an impression of Edward G. Robinson.

Cage is darkly hilarious, but the problem for Herzog is that it's difficult to make a parody of bad movies without, to some extent, making a bad movie. For a director who usually carries a keen and hypnotic visual sense, Bad Lieutenant is visually flat. As comfortable as the director is in expressing the menace of jungles and wilderness, he seems a little lost in the urban jungle of New Orleans, and the film never really uses its post-Katrina setting to the effect one might expect. There's some of Herzog's usual love-hate commentary on American culture here, but much of it is lost amid the lurid insanity. Ultimately, Bad Lieutenant is pretty smart as satire, but may be forgettable as cinema. While it lasts, though, it's funny as hell.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens today at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Shirlington.
View the trailer.

Filed in Arts and Events and tagged movies, New Orleans, Nicholas Cage, Werner Herzog

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