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Nicholas Cage destroys another film in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

The first The Bad Lieutenant was a 1992 Harvey Keitel vehicle that was all grit over polish, a film that showed the underbelly of being one of the city’s finest.  It was more of an art-house film that had all the elements of a big action piece.  So, I guess that it would make Hollywood sense (as compared to real sense) to lift the title and paste in on another rogue bad cop adventure and call it The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.  The only element to transfer over from the former film is the title.

The flick opens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and two cops having to save a criminal locked up in the basement.  Terence McDonagh (Nicholas Cage) is a stand up kind of guy and Stevie (Val Kilmer) just wants to leave the perpetrator for the morgue to find.  Terence jumps in the brown mucky water and we dissolve to one year later.  Terrence is being moved up to Lieutenant.  His doctor has told him that he will have chronic pain for the rest of his life due to something happening that fateful day.  This incident has led to an addiction problem with cocaine being the drug of choice. 

Terrence has a gal, the prostitute with a heart of gold Frankie (Eva Mendes).  Though she pleasures any man with the cash, her heart and her nose belong to her coke fueled man.  Terrence has no problem shaking down club patrons for drugs, getting a little something on the side.  There are confidants in the police evidence room that will help ‘fix’ him up.  Basically, he is living a life on the edge going close to collapse and falling in the pit of disaster.

Terence is investigating the slaying of a family in one of the poorest areas of the Big Easy.  That investigation leads to the nabbing of three local thugs.  The arrests stir something in Terrence’s brain and he decides that he wants to put these scumbags in jail for a long haul.  His detective work and ‘cowboy ways’ lead him to a fifteen year-old kid who has information on the killings. 

While the elements of correct police work struggle against the Id tendencies of our hero, Terrence has to save the girl, find the bad guys and connect all the dots while the lines of drugs swirl around his head.  His ‘by any means means necessary is justified’ never works in the idea of paying for one’s sins.  The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans weaves a dense tapestry of elements into a pattern that makes not a lick of sense in the final analysis.

The audience for the film was howling at the screen, never a good sign in a drama.  I’m truly not sure if the film was to be a parody of these films or a bad example of them.  Every cliché imagined under the ‘cop’ sun is brought into the light with The Bad Lieutenant.  Writer William Finkelstein isn’t sure exactly what kind of picture he’s making, with laugh inducing dialogue and plot holes one could drive a truck through.  It is past silly and into inane on the road to Razzie Award glory.

At times Nicholas Cage goes from rogue officer to stroke victim with his acting style.  He transmogrifies his mouth in such a Play-Dough of convolutions that in becomes almost comical how bad he can malign the unintended chuckle-filled dialogue.  One begins to believe that all the drugs have permanently fogged his brain and centered on the speech patterns.  It is at if times he has forgotten the dramatic tics he started just a few scenes back.  Cage is just a distracted mess.

Eva Mendes is every cliché as our fallen woman but pulls off the much maligned role with a mouse morsel of dignity.  She is trying to put a little reality in her scenes when she should have just brought a gallon of salt for her fellow actors to use as they chewed on every bit of scenery.  She should have just joined in on the crash and taken giant chunks out of the screen with each scene.

Both Val Kilmer and Fairuza Balk are in ‘blink and you miss them’ roles, with Kilmer getting just a few more scenes than the young independent actress.  This comes under the heading that if someone offers you the part and you haven’t worked in awhile, you take it no matter how small.  But in a disaster like this, the less time on the screen, much the better.
Werner Herzog is proving that you can have a strong cast and still make a rotten movie.  If he were playing the film as a parody it would have worked better.  We get what could be a first from Herzog—a few shots are reptile-cam, lensed from the viewpoint of an alligator and an iguana.  The POV picts come across as a cross between bad experimental film-making and psychedelic1960’s sensory flicks.  Or maybe Herzog was using the reptiles as a metaphor for how devolved man has become over the last million years.  Besides,  The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans is such a poorly shot film that one would wonder why anyone would romanticize the Big Easy. 

If they were looking for a better title for The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, they could have called it Naked Gun 44 and ¾: The Next Generation.  Leslie Nelson couldn’t have done better with the material.  Some are going to find this as a little gem in the ‘so bad, it’s good’ category, which is the perfect place to set it.  For unintended laughs this could be the comedy of the decade.

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