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

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.