Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans Review

Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, to give it its full title, arrives on a wave of glowing reviews and praise for Nicolas Cage’s “return to form” performance. In the end the film is one great big joke, which is fine because Cage and director Werner Herzog are clearly in on it. However I’m not sure it’s a return to form performance. Cage has been doing “weird” and “over the top” and “what-the-fuck crazy” for years. The only difference with Bad Lieutenant is that finally it’s a role that suits his weird, over the top and what-the-fuck crazy. Rather than shoehorning that into, say, The Wicker Man which (despite being a terrible film in many ways) badly suffers from a miscast Cage, even if one could argue that Cage’s tics and affectations provide most of the film’s highlights, with Bad Lieutenant, drug addled, boozed up, corrupt beyond belief cop Terrence McDonagh actually benefits from a dialled up to 11 Nicolas Cage.

Is there much point in discussing the story? I’m not really sure there is. McDonagh injures his back, gets addicted to painkillers, gets addicted to coke, gets addicted to heroin, gets a blowjob from the girlfriend of a guy whose drugs he took on the pretext of being a cop but actually, he just wanted the drugs, (naturally the young man is forced to watch said blowjob) and hallucinates seeing many, many iguanas and the break dancing sole of a dead drug dealer (no joke). Makes sense right?

In case it isn’t clear, this version of Bad Lieutenant bears precisely zero relation to Abel Ferrara’s original. Gone are the catholic guilt, Harvey Keitel's swinging willy and the always popular nun-rape. In its place are a series of increasingly over the top and bizarre scenes that don’t really form a narrative as much as they do a series of increasingly over the top and bizarre scenes. The last 20 minutes in particular is so ridiculous that I’m convinced the film has switched perspectives from objective narrator to untrustworthy protagonist. If the last 20 minutes of the film aren’t a drug induced hallucination then what you actually have is Herzog and Cage standing behind the camera laughing hysterically at the giant piss take they have unleashed. And maybe it is that simple. Maybe that’s all they’ve done. Which is fine I guess. It’s certainly not the first time a director has given the two fingers to a genre and the studio financing the film. “You kill bugs GOOD Johnny!” I’m just not sure that’s enough. And, in a weird way, I was actually expecting the film, its tone and central performance, to be bigger. Given how over the top Cage always is, I’m not sure exactly how much more so he is here. This is basically a “see it once and get everything from it” film. There are hilarious moments to be sure, Cage hiding behind a door, shaving with an electric razor, the aforementioned sexual indiscretion and a great scene where he tortures a pensioner by cutting off the air supply from her oxygen tank. Maybe I’m greedy, but I still wanted more.

This is such a weird film. I’m not sure what else there is to say about it really…

5/10

By the way, for anyone who hasn’t seen the highlights of Neil LaBute's Wicker Man remake…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6i2WRreARo