Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/3/10
Sometimes you see a movie
and you've just got to say “Wow, that was something!” The Bad
Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans can be enjoyed on two levels.
The first is as a pedal-down crazy character study of a junkie cop who's
both over the edge in terms of what he'll do to get high and fascinatingly
moral in how he continues to do his job and look out for the people who
matter to him. As for the other level, I'm not really sure what it
is, but it certainly is there. Hard to remember the last time I came
out of a movie so clearly getting at something with no clue what that something
was. But as a dynamic star vehicle for Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant
didn't need to connect with me thematically to show me a good time.
This is a walk on the wild side well worth taking.
Terence McDonagh was a good
New Orleans cop who committed an act of heroism during Hurricane Katrina
he would live to regret. Diving into rising waters to save a junkie
locked in a holding cell, he badly injures his back, ensuring that he'll
be on prescription pain killers for the rest of his life. But McDonaugh's
cleared for duty, handed a medal and promoted to Lieutenant, a promotion
that distances him from his straight-shooting but unethical former partner
Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer). But the Lieutenant has other things on
his mind now, mainly drugs: any kind he can get his hands on.
His hooker girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes) helps him score, but he's not
above shaking down young partygoers for their stash in exchange for not
arresting them. In fact, he seems to enjoy that. But his day
job still means something to him, particularly the case of five murdered
Senegalese immigrants that seems to lead back to a drug lord known as Big
Fate (Xzibit). He's got a reluctant witness, young Daryl (Denzel
Whitaker), and has to watch him 24/7 even while dealing with a nut job
client (Michael Shannon) of Frankie's and his hired goons, watching his
father's (Tom Bower) dog while he attends rehab, and trying to bet himself
out of a hole with his bookie (Brad Dourif). As pressure mounts from
every direction, it seems like a very bad day to be a Bad Lieutenant.
But if Terence can just keep all his plates spinning long enough, perhaps
Fate will intervene.
The Bad Lieutenant:
Port of Call-New Orleans shares a title, a basic concept, and apparently
little else with Abel Ferrara's 1992 Harvey Keitel vehicle Bad Lieutenant.
I've never seen it, which hopefully spares me from the Fatwas Ferrara's
been issuing against everyone connected to this remake/sequel/misunderstanding,
but also puts me at a disadvantage when tempted to praise the originality
of Herzog's delightfully mad enterprise. This is the kind of subject
matter usually handled either with a sledgehammer of tragic inevitability
or a Tarantinoesque hipster wackiness, but Herzog and veteran TV writer
William Finklestein (the longtime Stephen Bochco collaborator is making
his feature debut) are going someplace entirely different. Bad
Lieutenant is so much fun precisely because the only thing off-kilter
about it is its' hero, and he's gone completely over the side. Lt.
McDonaugh hasn't just developed a taste for drugs, he's developed a taste
for The Dark Side, but it's utterly fascinating the way he uses those vices
to continue doing his job. The first time we see him pull his Club
Kids shakedown, it's clear that his goal is just to get their drugs, but
then it keeps going and going, and it's equally clear that he wants to
see how far he can push his victims and what corrupt tricks they've got
up their sleeves to try and escape arrest. It's not just because
he's a kinky bastard that he makes the guy stay and watch his girlfriend's
solution to their problem: he's also still doing his job, trying
to teach a moral lesson even as he's unwilling to learn it himself.
Later, he threatens an old woman with cutting off her oxygen to get answers
in his investigation and afterwards blows up at the lady for living so
long and soaking up her relatives' inheritance, with most of his disgust
really directed at himself. Are the things he does late in the movie
a brilliant plan or blind luck? Through the haze in which he lives
his life, is there any difference?
Watching Cage fire off Corrupt,
Tripping, Righteous and Enraged in more or less random order is Bad
Lieutenant's highlight: this is the kind of high-wire act performance
for which he made his name. But what makes the movie work is that
the other Cage is mixed in there too, the guy who's been the hero of a
dozen Jerry Bruckheimer spectaculars. However much Terence McDonagh
should burn in Hell for the things he does, we can see that he's always
working two angles: one that gets him his fix and another designed
to make it all work out in the end. And perhaps the most unique and
hard to figure part of Bad Lieutenant is that for all the horrors
it shows us, it's a movie that really believes that good is a stronger
force in the universe than evil. Terence's good deeds aren't just
some fiend spitting in the wind, they really do make a difference both
for the world and perhaps for his own soul. At least I think so:
as I said, the closing scenes are so unexpected in a movie of this kind
that I kept expecting some sort of ironic payoff that didn't come.
It's refreshingly unusual, but I'm still trying to puzzle out what Herzog
and Finkelstein expect me to make of it all.
The supporting cast is game
as well, with Mendes (who also co-starred with Cage in Ghost
Rider) doing that “bad girl who's not really so bad” thing she excels
at and Kilmer showing off how you support a great performance without trying
to upstage it as he plays “good cop with a heart of coal” to the star's
“bad cop with a heart of gold”. Xzibit excels at sidestepping the
Gangsta cliches to create a character who really does see himself as just
a businessman with a gun. Dourif is a hoot as the longsuffering bookie,
Bower is pitched just right as the father who uses rehab as an excuse to
duck all his responsibilities, and Shannon is delightful as the well-connected
John who's so confident his Daddy can get him out of anything he comes
armed with his own catchphrase. Elsewhere, Jennifer Coolidge is convincingly
trashy as McDonagh's mother-in-law, who believes the answer to her husband's
alcoholism lies in sticking to beer, and Fairuza Balk has a couple of good
scenes as an old friend of the Bad Lieutenant who learns firsthand how
far he's fallen.
For a Werner Herzog movie,
it's kinda straightforward, with attractive cinematography of post-Katrina
New Orleans by Peter Zeitlinger. But it's also seriously funny and
mixes in some utterly bizarre “Hey, Ma, look at me!” shots of Iguanas and
Alligators the director shot himself to reflect his protagonist's bizarro
state of mind. And when he tells Big Fate to shoot a guy again because
“His soul is still dancing,” don't think we won't see what he's talking
about. If you can root for a bad, bad man because his heart is in
the right place, odds are you'll have a great time at The Bad Lieutenant:
Port of Call-New Orleans. And, who knows, maybe you can even
tell me what the point of it all is. All I can say for certain is
it sure is something! |
