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Visual:		8.0
Audio:		6.0
Acting:		9.0
Writing:		7.0
Score:		9.0

Director(s):	Werner Herzog
Writer(s):	William Finkelstein
Starring:	Brad Dourif • Eva Mendes • Jennifer Coolidge • Michael Shannon • Nicolas Cage • Val Kilmer • Xzibit
Genre:	Crime • Drama
Website:	http://www.badlt.com/
Release Date:	November 20, 2009
Rated:

To call Port of Call New Orleans a remake or a re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant would be a mistake; at least beyond an attempt to drum up publicity, which it definitely received when the original Bad Lieutenant’s director, Abel Ferrara, publicly wished for the deaths of everyone involved in this film. Especially that of its new helmer, the fearless Werner Herzog.

After watching the movie, it would be foolish to overlook the fact that it bears almost no resemblance to Ferrara’s film. It doesn’t even have the same titular character. Despite sharing the same moniker and the same appetite for moral compromise, Nicolas Cage’s goofy Detective McDonagh has a vastly different personality than that of Harvey Keitel’s nameless cult figure.

We first meet Cage’s drug-fueled, money-skimming maniac cop when he’s raiding a precinct’s flooded locker room in the days following Hurricane Katrina, stealing nude photos of his Captain’s wife. So he makes his debut as a jerk, but what he does next puts that into question. A perp is still locked in his cell, begging for help, with the water level rising and a snake swimming around. McDonagh complains about the brown water and his $55 boxer shorts, but jumps in to save him anyway.

Fast-forward six months later and Det. McDonagh is now Det. Lt. McDonagh. Did he save the man just to get a promotion? We only have our suspicions. We don’t really get a lot of insights into what McDonagh’s real intentions are; we just follow him as he makes one contradictory decision after another.

The plot of the film is the murder investigation of a family of illegal immigrants. Despite the CSI angle, the script offers no procedural twists. There’s only ever one suspect, the symbolically named drug kingpin Big Fate (Xzibit). The twists come from McDonagh himself—we’re never quite sure what he’s going to do next. Is he a good cop who can’t help but do bad things, or is he a bad cop who does good things to get ahead? Is there a difference?

Emphasis is given on predator superiority. McDonagh fends off and feeds off of a collection of odd needy characters: his crazy partner Det. Pruit (Val Kilmer), his junkie hooker girlfriend (Eva Mendes), a persistent bookie (Brad Dourif), a meek evidence room clerk (Michael Shannon) and an alcoholic stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge). The characters circle one another like a food chain, with McDonagh desperately trying to stay at the top. The more he acts like an asshole, the more he prevails. This is occasionally supported by bizarre reptile-cams. Herzog would insert long shots from a crocodile or an iguana’s point of view, in scenes where they assert dominance. As if not to be outpredatored, shots from McDonagh’s dashboard as he cruises the night looking for citizens to harass evokes the same feeling.

This movie has all these wild suggestive ideas that don’t quite add up, but thrilling to puzzle out nonetheless. Case in point: I’m not completely sure if McDonagh is supposed to be the spirit of New Orleans—his bad back being Katrina and his constant hallucinations a reference to its mysticism—but that implies that the city’s an opportunist, unable to recover from its misfortune because it seeks destructive quick fixes, and any improvements are for show only. It’s a flimsy conclusion, sure, but it’s the kind of thing the film prods at.

Herzog is best known for his collaboration with the late Klaus Kinski, whose performances in Herzog’s films painted him as this sort of exemplary figure of insane determination. In recent years, when Herzog’s not off shooting award-winning documentaries, he has worked with charismatic leads like Christian Bale, Brad Dourif and Tim Roth; but none of them could match Kinski’s level of attention grabbing. Until Nicolas Cage. His performance is so unchecked, so uninhibited, so over-the-top, that it’s like putting blinders on: you’re just here for Cage.

McDonagh is easily Cage’s best character work since Adaptation. It’s so good to see him legitimately try again, while still maintaining that crazy-haired ferocity that we’ve come to love to hate. I’m glad he gets to react to different drugs here. When he’s on heroin, Cage does his sleepy act so well. When he’s on coke, he’s so convincingly energetic that Herzog reportedly grilled Cage to make sure he was snorting fake cocaine.

It’s a campy film that’s structurally demolished, but keeps it together with rough-hewn characterizations and an endlessly entertaining tone. It breaks down the barrier between intentional and unintentional comedy. You can’t tell me that Herzog didn’t want to make this movie as funny as it is, but its approach is so far away from a conventional satire. It’s the best kind of black humor, one that draws laughs by making you wonder if it’s ever serious.

I’m reminded of Gran Torino in a way. In both movies, the sheer commitment to play the ridiculous main character sincerely buries all other questionable aspects and makes it work. If Bad Lieutenant isn’t the most absorbing movie of the year, then at least the character is. At one point, he frisks a girl coming out of a club, demands to smoke her rock, then has sex with her in an open parking lot, grabbing her ass while moaning, “Daddy ever molllllesssst you?” That’s just some kind of wonderful.