Sunday, December 06, 2009
A+E, Movies, Reviews

Off the wall

Nicolas Cage shines as an unhinged ‘Bad Lieutenant’

BY STEVE WARREN

No one would have expected Werner Herzog, the wild man of German cinema, to wind up in the U.S. making genre films. But if they had, they would have expected those films to be as crazy as “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.”

Distantly related to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 “Bad Lieutenant” (you might call it “remake-ish”), the neo-noir shows that in Nicolas Cage, Herzog has found the American equivalent of the late Klaus Kinski, star of his most important German films. There’s no funnier actor in the movies than Cage when he’s being serious, so one wonders whether he was aware Herzog was making a comedy.

In the opening sequence, prior to his promotion, Sgt. Terence McDonagh (Cage) seems like he’ll become a good lieutenant. At least he’s the lesser of two evils when, partnered with Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer), he injures his back saving a drowning prisoner in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A doctor prescribes Vicodin for his “moderate to severe back pain.”

We don’t know if Terence did drugs before, but soon Vicodin is the least of what he’s taking. “Whatever I take’s prescription,” he says at one point, “except for the heroin.” His sex and gambling addictions seem well established. He stalks young couples coming out of a club and shakes them down for sex (with the female partner) and drugs. He’s also in a primary relationship with a prostitute, Frankie (Eva Mendes), and sometimes shakes down her clients.

To qualify “Bad Lieutenant” as a police procedural, there’s the ongoing case of a family of five illegal Senegalese immigrants who are murdered, “execution-style,” presumably for selling drugs on the turf of Big Fate (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner). There are minor suspects and a teenage eyewitness (Denzel Whitaker of “The Great Debaters”), but like the other cops (Kilmer, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Shawn Hatosy), they mostly just eat Cage’s dust.

The crime plot fills the gaps between the wonderfully wacky character study segments, which get wilder as they go along. Unlike Harvey Keitel’s “Bad Lieutenant,” who saw Jesus when he hallucinated (the biggest difference between the films is the absence of religious themes in this one), Terence sees iguanas. It’s more like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” with the best performances by reptiles (including a snake and an alligator) since “V.”

Terence is semi-estranged from his father (Tom Bower), a retired cop who’s “drinking himself into an early grave.” Among the film’s oddities is a straight performance by the usually campy Jennifer Coolidge as Terence’s beer-guzzling stepmother.

Cage is so far off the wall that the wall is nowhere in sight. Though this is unquestionably his best performance in a long time, some might argue that it’s actually bad acting that happens to fit the style of the film. (He’s so convincing that the director reportedly thought he was actually high on the set.) Either way, there’s madness in Herzog’s method that makes “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” a total hoot. 3 STARS