#58: The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

My name is Ed, and I am attempting to learn the fundamental truth behind everything by watching every Nicolas Cage film in order. At the very least, I intend to win the UK National Lottery by entering using a set of numbers based on each and every film.

New Orleans has not had that great a time of it over the last couple of decades. For a start, it was the location of at least two deeply terrible films: Zandalee, an erotic thriller in which Nicolas Cage ends up covering himself in paint after accidentally cuckolding Judge Reinhold to death, and also Sonny, a Nicolas Cage’s aimlessly depressing directorial debut in which James Franco plays a gigolo pimped out by his own mother.

If that wasn’t bad enough, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina attempted to wipe it off the face of the planet. And before it could even properly recover from that, Nic Cage turned up again, this time with Werner Herzog, for The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

If you’ve never encountered Herzog: he made a film about a lunatic making people drag a huge ship over a mountain, by making people drag a huge ship over a mountain. He walked from Munich to Paris in the middle of a snowstorm as a ritual act to cure a friend’s illness. He once literally ate a shoe because he lost a bet. Why not do a Herzog impression by affecting a German growl and saying “But life, is it not also death?”

Herzog and Cage were in town to, ostensibly, remake Abel Ferrera’s 1992 film, Bad Lieutenant. I’ve never seen the original — but then neither has Herzog, who insists that it isn’t a remake, but a slightly similar film marketed by the studio under the same ‘brand’. For his part, Abel Ferrera says that he wishes everyone involved in the second film would die in explosive car accident (no, really).

Port of Call New Orleans is police procedural as ludicrously dark farce. Cage is the Bad Lieutenant, McDonagh, assigned to investigate the gang-related murder of five illegal immigrants. But at the same time he’s trying to juggle his constant, vast (and varied) drug intake, vanishing witnesses, spiralling gambling debts, his sex worker girlfriend (Eva Mendes here redeeming herself for the abysmal Ghost Rider), and the occasional hallucinatory iguana.

Cage is a shambling, bellowing agent of chaos, visibly wracked with physical and mental pain. Not only is he heavily addicted to painkillers (after suffering a back injury during a brief moment of bravery during Katrina), but every problem he solves seems to cause three more. During the course of his ‘investigation’, we see him arresting kids just to steal their drugs, trying to fix football games to pay his gambling debts, even suffocating a rich old woman who he thinks has impeded his investigation (he relents, before screaming that she’s ‘the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain’).

At one point we find ourselves at lizard’s eye view, following the crawling animal edging around a crime scene, as though Herzog has finally become so disgusted with humans that he can barely stand to be one. The film is an intensely odd experience, a horribly cynical, relentlessly, supernaturally, and laughably unpleasant. But there’s something mesmerising about it: a demented beauty that rises out of all the Herzogian chaos. I give it 5 out of 5 boats pulled over mountains.

THE NUMBERS

5 — The case McDonagh is trying to solve for most of the movie is the murder of 5 illegal immigrants from Senegal. Can you count to 5?
15 — Daryl, a young witness to the crime, asks if he can be on the stand before May 15th, because that’s when his mother goes before the parole board.
23 — McDonagh’s vicodin prescription costs 23 dollars with his copay, which is something to do with America’s broken healthcare system, right readers?
24 — The opening scene with the jail cells flooded with dirty water involved using 2,400 bags of coffee to get the water the right colour. They started with regular coffee but the actor playing the prisoner was absorbing it through his skin (and presumably getting too wired even for a Herzog movie).
25 —McDonagh attempts to pressure the footballer Renaldo Hayes into throwing a game so that he can win a bet. Hayes fakes an injury to avoid doing this, but we see him on the sideline, wearing shirt number 25. It’s American football, so it’s all a load of rubbish anyway, right readers?
55 — In the opening McDonagh is reticent about saving a prisoner from a flooding cell because he’s wearing underwear that cost 55 dollars. It’s made from Swiss cotton, apparently. Right readers?

THE RESULT

1 number. More like fucking shit lieutenant.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Another near miss for Cage at ‘playing a proper superhero’, in Kick-Ass.