Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Here's a question: what do you get when you combine Nicolas Cage, copious amounts of cocaine, hallucinatory iguanas, and dancing souls? Apparently, an uncomfortably dreary cop drama punctuated by oddly inspired moments of silliness. With so much strangeness woven into the fabric of the clumsily titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, it's especially difficult to decipher why the movie feels so limply ineffective, so lamely dull. Sure, the iguanas are great fun and the dancing souls are worth a laugh, plus the movie boasts Cage occasionally spewing maniacal laughter, but the quirky qualities of this murky mess are suffocated by an awkward adherence to cop movie rules.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans tells the story of a drug-addicted cop named Terrance McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), who is pretty good at his job, as long as you dismiss his regular habit of pilfering drugs from the police property room and busting people on the street so he can steal their drugs and have sex with their girlfriends. Other than that, Terrance is a great cop. In fact, he's so good that he is promoted to the position of lieutenant early in the movie. This promotion gives him more room to exercise his corrupt activities, which basically leads to a lot of scenes where Cage snorts cocaine and sometimes even smokes it in his "lucky crack pipe."

The idea that Terrance has something as delightfully offbeat as a lucky crack pipe is promising, as it playfully suggests the strangeness at work in this Bad Lieutenant's world. But this is a cop movie first and foremost and so Terrance has a case he must solve and around which much of the plot must revolve. The case currently occupying Terrance's time is a multiple homicide concerning the gang-style slaughter of a family of Senegalese immigrants. The patriarch of the family was supposedly involved in dealing heroin, so Terrance's job requires him to start digging around in the seedy underbelly of New Orleans.

This isn't much of an issue for Terrance, since his fearless attitude and affinity for drugs helps him feel pretty comfortable in the presence of gun-toting drug dealers. Plus, Terrance might procure some free drugs of his own, so it's a win-win situation for this casually corrupt cop. Unfortunately, it's not much of a win-win situation for us viewers, because the uninteresting murder case occupies a large chunk of the plot pie, even though director Werner Herzog seems entirely bored with the police procedural aspects of the story.

Herzog has been busy making brilliant documentaries (such as Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World) for the last few years, but he's decided to close out the decade with this swampy flick about a really Bad Lieutenant doing a lot of drugs and experiencing humorous hallucinations. When the movie relaxes into the situations of comedic mayhem, Herzog's direction begins to buzz with life and imagination. Souls are dancing and iguanas are being captured in extended close-up shots for no better reason than to bathe in the goofy glory of Terrance's drug-addled world. In these moments, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans shines in its own loopy way.

But then it's back to the standard cop drama and the movie suffers a tonal shift that renders it nearly forgettable. The crazy spirit that inhabits the scenes of cinematic insanity is suddenly buried beneath a pile of narrative rubble that borders on plain and boring. Cage's performance is certainly wacky and Terrance is seemingly unable to do anything by the book, but the actor is simply doing a more perverse version of his regular shtick. Cage is fun to watch during a few scenes, but he lacks the powerful presence and commanding charisma that would make Terrance a character worth caring about.

Since Terrance is a relatively despicable human being, it is imperative that Cage make him intriguing and engaging enough to follow on his journey. But Cage merely opts for a lot of vacant stares and the occasional outburst of explosive laughter. He never manages to climb inside of Terrance's skin and make him anything more than a mildly amusing pastiche of past Cage characters, such as the ones he portrayed in Leaving Las Vegas and Bringing Out the Dead. With Cage recycling performance material and Herzog only exhibiting any energy when iguanas and dancing souls appear, this Bad Lieutenant should be demoted.