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Release: Now available on DVD
Duration: 122 minutes
Rating: MA (strong drug use, frequent coarse language and sex scene)

Although Nicolas Cage has been (rightly) lambasted for his recent work in the cheese-ball National Treasure franchise, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans represents a return to artistic risk-taking for the much-beleaguered American actor. Superficially cheesy and clichéd, the role of the Bad Lieutenant is a brave, wild and crazy take on the noir anti-hero and represents director Werner Herzog’s agitation against pretension, as evidenced by the film’s incorporation of iguanas and break-dancing ghosts in this mocking take on the tough-guy cop drama.

After Detective Terence McDonagh injures his back when saving a prisoner from a flooding cell in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, he develops an addiction to pain killers, cocaine and then just about everything else to mask his increasing pain and stress. In the same week that he is trying to steal evidence from the police station, pay back his increasingly inpatient bookie, protect his hooker girlfriend from beatings and resolve a troubled relationship with his father, he is also attempting to convict a known drug lord for murder, even as he is working with the suspect in killing rival gangs and asserting further control over the New Orleans drug scene.

Herzog’s film (a remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel shocker, Bad Lieutenant, in name only) is an attack on convention, upturning viewer’s expectations with its unhinged direction and increasingly baffling story of corruption, sin and deranged immorality. Although the screenplay by television writer William M. Finkelstein verges on the melodramatic (the opening sequence paints the character as a wounded hero and gives him a sympathetic, identifiable motivation for his drug-addiction and lapse into depravity), director Herzog and his star pushes the material into something a lot more compelling and interesting through the unpredictable absurdity of Cage’s wry, bizarre characterisation.

Sequences involving McDonagh threatening an elderly woman and her carer and his friendly relationships with prostitutes and the local drug lord accentuate the ludicrousness of the story. Dialogue like “Do fish have dreams?” and “I’ll kill the three of you… ‘til the break of dawn, baby” are delivered by Cage as if they were poetic, clever or menacing (or, in most instances, all of the above), upturning cop movie clichés and parodying overblown action film one-liners for a crazed, unhinged portrayal of vice and decadence. This is embodied in a sequence in which a group of New Orleans’ finest scope out a neighbouring address, but McDonagh is more instead interested in an iguana lying on the coffee table, as evidenced here:

This sequence has little to do with the plot, and exists simply to present unease on the part of the viewer, who are left to question whether this is one of the Lieutenant’s drug-induced hallucination.

Although you might find the plot in a Direct-to-DVD, low-budget thriller (which, to be honest, it is, as it has bypassed cinemas in this country for a DVD release), The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a remarkable account of genre parody and intellectual absurdity, finding equal parts seriousness and silliness in lines such as “Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing.”

Jarrod Harvey