Nicholas Cage on crack - ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans’ Review

Posted on December 7, 2009 - 10:24pm by michael Bad Lieutenant is a gritty action drama in the vein of old Raymond Chandler novels, except set against the backdrop of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans - and with more drugs. It’s being hailed left and right as a masterful combination of the talents of Nicholas Cage and director Herner Werzog, although I will tell you that I found it to be distinctly and powerfully depressing. But maybe that’s just me. Seeing hard drugs in the movies is not exactly my favorite thing, and it takes a significant amount of other impressive material to make it work for me. Pulp Fiction, for example. Bad Lieutenant is being regularly hailed as a masterful combination between Herzog’s distinctive style and Cage at his over-the-top best, and it’s true. I could do with a little less bizarre, iguana-related symbolism, though. Then again, it is indeed nice to see some real thought and meaning put into the photography of any film, but Herzog puts alligators and iguanas in extreme close-ups while playing wildly incongruous music, facing us with an unsettling metaphor that only becomes evident much later. He does, however, skillfully present the sodden, dreary atmosphere of post-Katrina New Orleans, giving us a reptilian portrayal of the city and its law enforcement. Nicholas Cage plays Terence McDonagh, a New Orleans cop with more than enough drug addictions to make up for his total lack of ethics, as well as the single similarity between this movie and the 1992 film starring Harvey Keitel which, incidentally, Martin Scorsese calls one of the best films of the 1990s. During the Katrina floods, Terence and his partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) are teasing a prisoner trapped in a flooding prison cell when Terence has a change of heart and decides to let him out. Hopping into the water, he somehow sustains a back injury that leaves him with permanent pain, for which his doctor prescribes the medication that will unleash an avalanche of addictions for him. Soon, he is assigned to the case of the murder of five illegal aliens who seem to have been killed by a local drug kingpin. Needless to say, Terence is the wrong detective for the case. The movie slows down and shows us in great detail as Terence increasingly lives up to the movie’s title, busting people on small-time drug charges purely for the purpose of getting his own hands on their drugs, and ultimately teaming up with the same smuggler that he was supposed to be investigating in the first place. Meanwhile, he has to routinely get his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes) out of various jams and track down a teenage boy, who is the only witness in the murder investigation but who has been jetted off to England by his concerned grandmother. He and the entire murder subplot summarily disappear for the majority of the running time. There are a number of good and bad scenes, although both equally memorable. The hilarious scene of Terence losing his patience and storming the pharmacy for his prescription is easily overshadowed by the unnecessary and much overdone scene where he brutalizes a couple of frail old women. We get that he’s a junkie and he’s totally unhinged. We don’t need to watch him cutting off the oxygen supplies of grandmothers while cussing them out. That just doesn’t make sense, kind of like how Terence is stripped of his badge not because of the time a bookie (Brad Dourif) strutted right into the police station and berated him in front of the entire force for not paying his gambling debts, but for all that “cowboy sh*t.” [caption id="attachment_65918" align="alignright" width="355" caption="Detective McDonagh's cronies law down the law."][/caption] Gambling is cool, but single-handedly apprehending suspects without a shot being fired? Hand over your gun, son. As far as action movies go, Bad Lieutenant is among the better ones, but is filled with strange symbolism that is thrust into our faces for the purpose of highlighting an already obvious message when it should have been more subtly used to accentuate the effectively oppressive post-disaster atmosphere. New Orleans’ entropic degeneration is manifested in Terence’s own corruption, and there is a brilliant movie in there, but overall it feels like we’re looking so much through Terence’s diseased mind that it becomes off-putting and ultimately depressing. There are times when deliberately depressing movies are well-made (Buffalo ’66, for example), and Bad Lieutenant is one of them, but do we really have to suffer so much along the way? The Bean Meter