Film

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: Bad Cop, Bad Cop

by Brendan Kiley

Except for a few uncomfortably long stares at reptiles (iguanas, alligators), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is only secretly a Werner Herzog movie. It feels, instead, like a screwball crime comedy for people who like their humor on the gallows side. (Which, I guess you could argue, is kinky enough to qualify as Herzogian.)

Nicolas Cage plays a both schlubby and maniacal cop with a rug of hair, a crazy crackhead cackle, and a big damn revolver stuck sloppily into the front of his wrinkled pants. His true loves are his dad (a drunk living out in a big, paint-chipped Louisiana house-on-sticks that you will covet until your dying day), his prostitute girlfriend ("the pross," the characters keep calling her), gambling on football, and snorting heroin. He'll take cocaine and crack when it comes his way, but he loves the horse. That love drives the entire film.

A few things officer Terence McDonagh does to score: shakes down kids leaving bars, seduces a member of the highway patrol who has access to an evidence locker, tracks down and joins forces with one of the city's heroin kings (Xzibit) who he's supposed to be arresting for the execution of an entire African family. The characters are almost universally rotten (except "the pross," of course, who has a heart of gold); a bloated-looking Val Kilmer plays another cop who'll let a prisoner drown in his hurricane-flooded cell just because he's Latino. The heroin kingpin is a rapist. Mafia goons who've come to extort money from McDonagh ask to "saddle up" the pross-with-a-heart-of-gold in "the spirit of friendship." McDonagh doesn't seem too dismayed by the request.

Their monstrousness is weirdly palatable. Another Herzogian characteristic: Bad Lieutenant's relentless, objective amoralism. The film tells its story without any histrionics or argument that its characters should be other than what they are. It wants us to have fun and only occasionally drops a reminder that these aren't really dudes you want to spend your time with: the rape references, an ashtray hurled at a babymama's head, lots of casual racism.

The 1992 Bad Lieutenant, directed by Abel Ferrara, was a darker story about a New York cop (Harvey Keitel) coming to redemption. The 2009 Bad Lieutenant doesn't really care if anybody gets redeemed. And Herzog doesn't really care about the 1992 Bad Lieutenant. When Ferrara heard about the new film, he said: "I wish these people die in hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up." Herzog replied that he had never heard of Ferrara and never seen any of his films. After this Bad Lieutenant, perhaps nobody will again. McDonagh is such a likable degenerate, he might join the pantheon with Scarface and Vincent Vega.