The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans is the best bad movie I've seen in years. It ranks with Twilight in engendering unintended laughter. By the end of the film, I was rolling in the aisles. I don't think the film was conceived as a comedy, but somewhere along the way, the producers must have thrown in the towel. Maybe it was when director Werner Herzog started filming extreme close ups of iguanas and alligators - sticking the camera practically up their nostrils. Maybe it was when Nicholas Cage, asked to play a character with a bad back, developed his Hunchback of Notre Dame walk, lurching rather than limping. Regardless, it was the right move to make. If this film had been played straight - say if Tony Scott has directed it - it would have been unbearable, boring - a run-of-the-mill police procedural. As is, it is an instant cult classic - a black comedy goldmine.
The film has nothing to do with the original Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Keitel played a heroin-addicted homicide detective with a penchant for pulling women over and masturbating all over their cars. The protagonists of both films are drug-addicted homicide detectives who abuse their powers. The similarities end there. The original offered a stark, near unwatchable, character study. This time around, no matter how desperate or depraved Cage becomes, it just plays for laughs.
The plot has Cage tracking down the killers responsible for murdering a family. He gets high with suspects, he interrogates suspects by putting his gun to their heads, he smokes crack, he snorts coke, he takes pain killers. In one scene, he pulls a couple over in an alley, smokes dope with the girlfriend, then fucks her while her boyfriend watches. In another scene (the one that drew the biggest laughs), he cuts off the oxygen supply of an elderly woman in order to get a confession from her nurse. He's Dirty Harry without any redeeming factors. Even his girlfriend, played by Eva Mendes, is nothing more than a drug-addicted hooker. When Cage walks in on her and a client, instead of becoming angry or physically abusive, he takes advantage of the situation, and extorts drugs from the client, then shares them with Mendes.
Val Kilmer shows up for a few scenes, lending more cult status to the project. What was the last major motion picture Kilmer appeared in? Deja Vu? Shawn Hatosy makes an appearance as another cop, overacting in a valiant attempt to upstage Cage. (Which is impossible - try it in front of a mirror sometime.) The rest of the cast is filled out with criminals and bookies, because of course, in addition to a drug addiction, Cage has a gambling addiction, and is several thousand dollars in arrears. (The script forgets to have a scene where leg-breakers come after Cage to collect the debt, and he shoots them dead, then steals their wallets and smokes their cigarettes.)
The film is set in New Orleans just after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I don't know if the ravaged, degraded landscape is supposed to reflect Cage's inner psyche, but it's superfluous to the script, which could have been set in Juno, Alaska for all it matters. The only thing New Orleans lends to the project is its run down neighborhoods, its tax incentive, and the chance for Herzog to film those lizards and alligators. (I wonder if he kept any as pets. I bet he did.)
A movie like this is supposed to resolve the character's inner issues and turn them around into sympathetic souls who somehow redeem themselves despite murdering innocent people, suffocating elderly women, committing lascivious acts in public, and smoking, snorting, and drinking everything in reach. Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans does that, but didn't have to. I would have laughed just as much if it ended with Cage running down a bus load of retirees, as long as Cage had that ridiculous sneer on his face and that hunch to his walk.
In a particularly funny scene, Cage and some drug dealers shoot a rival dead, and after the smoke clears, Cage says, "Shoot him again. His soul's still dancing." That gets a laugh right there, but then we get the added bonus of seeing the dead man break dancing. That's right, break dancing.
The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans. Coming soon to the midnight circuit near you.
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