Holy Shit Is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Ever Crazy, Great
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When great European artists turn their attention to our country the results are sometimes revelatory. It can be fascinating as well as revealing seeing what the United States and its eccentric inhabitants look like through the eyes of others.
The transcendently bonkers 2009 dark comedy Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans afforded moviegoers the unimaginable pleasure and honor of seeing the United Stats through the crazed eyes of Werner Herzog.
Herzog is as famous for his outsized personality as his films these days. Like his Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans star Nicolas Cage, his persona and cult are so vast and colorful that they threaten to overshadow his extraordinary achievements as a filmmaker rather than a real-life cartoon character, the living embodiment of Old Country dread and despair.
Foreign artists often depict our country as a crazed caricature, a comically over-the-top cartoon of greed, violence and full-throated vulgarity. Yet they seldom go as far in this conception of our country as the craziest, most fucked up and surreal place on earth as Herzog does here.
On paper, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans looks like a perversely exploitative endeavor utterly unworthy of the remarkable talent assembled, a late in the game sorta sequel, sorta remake and sorta reboot of Abel Ferrara’s notoriously lurid 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is seemingly the kind of project that gets dumped quietly onto home video market: an in name only quasi-sequel/remake to a seventeen year old home video favorite with a different director and none of the original stars.
Herzog’s weird meditation on a quintessentially American film he claims to be unfamiliar with when he got the screenplay for what would become Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is instead high art in addition to being singularly satisfying trash.
The instant cult classic was supposed to take place in New York, like Ferrara’s film but Cage suggested filming in New Orleans to help the city recover financially from Hurricane Katrina.
It turned out to be a masterstroke. New Orleans is a uniquely American city that is Cage’s spiritual as well as literal home, and also the place where he will be buried but it’s also a world onto itself.
That is particularly true following Hurricane Katrina, when society as a whole seems to have broken down completely, giving way to something raw and untamed. It’s as if civilization had its chance but it failed New Orleans so it reverted back to a place of wildness and nature.
Herzog cuts to snakes and lizards and other creepy crawlies throughout Bad Lieutenant to drive home the idea that we’re all just animals struggling for survival in an insane world only humans have the arrogance to think they’re somehow superior.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina what The 25th Hour was to the poignant cultural moment following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001: a powerful, haunted elegy for a lost place and time.
In one of his best and most important roles, Cage delivers an unforgettable, iconic performance as New Orleans cop and all-around degenerate Terence McDonagh.
Like the angst-ridden paramedic Cage played in Bringing Out the Dead, Terence lives on the knife’s edge separating life and death. In both films, Cage’s job is to save people but in Bringing Out the Dead he’s an angel gently ushering the vulnerable into the next world. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, he’s a demon, a whirling dervish of malevolent energy spinning out wildly in all directions.
Terence is introduced in the watery, deadly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a prison that is empty except for one man on the verge of drowning to death unless saved immediately.
Despite the pitch-black, nihilistic nature of Terence’s banter with partner Detective Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer), he is not wholly without empathy or compassion for the city’s suffering souls. He dives in to save the prisoner but destroys the back in the process.
The unethical law enforcement officer becomes addicted to painkillers, crack and cocaine. He’s also a sexual predator, a gambling addict and an all around piece of work but he is nevertheless surprisingly good at his job. He’s the ultimate cop who plays by his own rules but gets results.
The corrupt copper has a warped moral code only he seems to understand that revolves around feeding his feverish compulsions at any cost but in a way that leads him closer and closer to getting his man.
The big case at the heart of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans involves an undocumented immigrant family from Senegal that was brutally murdered for selling drugs in a zone controlled by gangster Big Fate (Xzibit, in a standout performance that makes better use of his sonorous voice and badass presence than any other film or role ).
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is appropriately cynical about the bleary tragedy that is contemporary American life. Yet it’s weirdly non-cynical in places. It’s hard to believe, for example, that the police would care at all about the lives or deaths of undocumented immigrants of color.
When a low level gangster expresses surprise and horror to find a corrupt copper flagrantly breaking the law it similarly feels adorably naive. It seems like a low level gangster in New Orleans would be more surprised to find a cop who didn’t behave like a criminal than one who does.
Cage’s Ghost Rider costar Eva Mendes is quietly heartbreaking as the anti-hero/villain’s prostitute girlfriend. She’s vulnerable and a target for sexual violence because she’s a sex worker and because she’s addicted to cocaine but also simply because she’s beautiful and a gorgeous young woman is always going to be a popular target for male rage in a wicked world like this.
As Terence tries to crack the big case he descends further and further into the New Orleans underworld, a swampy stew of sin and degradation, debauchery and free-floating sadness.
In its vulgarity, luridness and casual, purposeful transgression, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans sometimes suggests a blaxploitation movie with the sleazy, corrupt, drug-addicted and sexually insatiable white cop as the protagonist/anti-hero rather than the villain.
It’s a hypnotic fever dream of delirious American excess that’s no less artful for also being pure trash.
Cage begins the film at 11 and maintains that level of pummeling intensity and pitch-black humor until the end credits but there are also moments scattered throughout when the deafening volume and craziness subsides and the movie becomes eerily, powerfully quiet and still.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans contains multitudes. It’s a film of surprising depth and richness, a movie to get lost in. It’s a goddamn gonzo masterpiece, is what it is, but would you expect anything less from the uniquely perfect team of Herzog and Cage?
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