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Movie Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
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Forget the Sarah Palin book. If you want to see what "going rogue" is all about, then head over to the Harkins Camelview 5 in Scottsdale to catch Nicholas Cage's crazed and devilish tour-de-force performance as detective Terence McDonagh in director Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. The film, which despite it's title and subject matter dealing with a police officer's descent into moral oblivion, has nothing to do with the 1992 Abel Ferrara film, Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel. Though both are character studies looking at corrupt, vice-ridden law enforcement officers and both feature tough, unflinching performances by their lead actors, Herzog's movie is it's own wild and crazy original work of art--and with way more laughs than the Ferrara film.
Cage's detective McDonagh suffers a severe line-of-duty back injury early in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans which triggers an obsessive quest for pain-killing drugs--prescription or otherwise. There's a scene where McDonagh, fed up with the wait at the local pharmacy, uses his badge and gun to speed up the process of getting his painkillers. From that point forward he decides to bypass pharmacies and doctors and becomes a rampaging coke, heroin and crack fiend who resorts to any means necessary to score whatever drug he can lay his hands on.
A favorite trick of McDonagh's is to pull up to a nightclub called Gator's Retreat and pull over exiting patrons, making up stories about how they "match the description of a couple passing drugs" inside the club. When one of the detained nightclubbers asks McDonagh "is there any way my father doesn't have to know about this?" the kid quickly finds out why that's one of the worst things you can ask a bad lieutenant. There, in fact, are lots of ways. All bad. Of course, the bad lieutenant proceeds to shake them down, steal their drugs, and worse.
But McDonagh isn't all bad and actually spends a good part of the film trying to bust a New Orleans drug kingpin for the murder of a family of Senegalese immigrants. This, though, is the most uninteresting part of the movie, which director Herzog occasionally allows to get bogged down in some really routine procedural stuff. What makes Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans the terrifically entertaining film it is is star Nicholas Cage's jittery, sweaty, over-the-top performance and indie film maverick Herzog's eccentric, go-for-broke direction. Both Cage and Herzog are loose and fearless and swinging for the fence with infectious abandon. Scenes like one where Cage's McDonagh roughs up two elderly women at gunpoint don't just stop at him removing an oxygen tube from one of their noses, but continue with an after-the-fact tongue lashing where he calls them "the reason this country's going down the f---ing drain!" There's an unbridled glee in the depravity and most every scene is ratcheted up to the craziest possible level for a trippy, hilarious blast of a film that gets funnier as it goes along.
Though Cage is getting all of the attention, the incredible supporting cast features great work by Brad Dourif, Cage's Ghost Rider co-star Eva Mendes, Michael Shannon, an almost unrecognizable Jennifer Coolidge (Best in Show) as Cage's drunken step mother, and a wonderful few minutes by an actor named Shea Whigham in a small but memorable role as a petty thug. Val Kilmer is in it too but, sadly, doesn't have all that much to do.
3-1/2 out of 4 stars
Now playing exclusively at Harkins Camelview 5 in Scottsdale.
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