Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

• Directed by Werner Herzog
• Written by William Finkelstein
• Starring Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes
• Classification: 18A

Right off, let's clear up any residual confusion: Despite its mouthful of a title, Bad Lieutenant: Port of CallNew Orleans is not remotely a remake of the 1992 Abel Ferrara film. That movie was a famously brutal and bleak drama about a drug-addled cop in the Big Apple. This is a never-brutal and surprisingly funny yarn about a drug-addled cop in the Big Easy. They're totally different beasts with completely different plots, and yet there is one common element. The male leads are the best reason to see both films - a scary Harvey Keitel in the first and a bizarre Nicolas Cage now. Add director Werner Herzog to the mix, a guy who knows a thing or a hundred about obsessive protagonists, and we're in for quite the ride - wild and weird and blackly comic.

The funny business starts in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, when a reluctant Terence (Cage) dives into filthy water to rescue a convict from his flooded jail cell. Six months later, that single investment has paid off in a dubious trifecta: a promotion to lieutenant, a chronically bad back, and an unquenchable appetite for any chemical - prescription or recreational, legal or not - that will ease the pain. So the cop, like the city, is facing the aftermath of a major trauma, and neither is faring very well.

Still, life and death go on, especially the latter - a multiple homicide wipes out a Senegalese family whose father was peddling heroin, an unwise amateur among the no-nonsense pros. Of course, Terence gets assigned the case, whereupon the narrative splits into overlapping halves - the attempt to do his job competing with the need to feed his habit. This is when Cage assumes full command of the screen. The star is seldom off camera and Herzog, as he so aptly put it in a press interview, "just turns the pig loose." Some pig, and here's why.

First, in order to convey the agony of that wonky back, Cage alters his entire body, leaning (and leading) with an angular chin, then sloping his shoulders on a sharp downward list to the right. He looks like a man walking on eggshells in a fierce crosswind; or, for the more theatrically minded, like Richard III in a polyester suit. His manner is made to measure, oscillating erratically between repose and mania, one moment a blank stare with mouth slightly agape, the next a mad cackle erupting from deep within a huge vat of cynicism. Memorably, in Leaving Las Vegas , Cage had an earlier bout with addiction, but that was a suicide pact played for existential despair. This is a whole other world; here, his unclean mind is hell-bent on survival, nothing more or less, and the result is an endurance test played for laughs.

The laughs come because, even as his world crumbles - bookies harass him, mobsters threaten him, key witnesses abandon him, internal affairs censors him - he stoops his way through the mess with a Keatonesque flair for the absurd, training one dilated pupil on the case and the other on getting his fix. And Terence is a supremely imaginative fixer. For a snort of coke or a toke of weed, he'll shake down anyone and raid anything - his girlfriend the hooker (Eva Mendes), the hooker's low-life clients, college kids clubbing in the French Quarter, the kitchen table of a prime suspect, the property department in his own cop shop.

Now the politically correct might wonder if such extracurricular zeal affects the performance of his lawful duties. Not really, not unless you count hallucinating iguanas while on a stakeout, or roughing up a wheelchair-bound granny in the parlour of her nursing home. Did I mention the humour was black? Meanwhile, having uncaged Cage at the centre of the thing, Herzog keeps the plot's multiple tangents and its many attendant characters in crisp order. Not that he cares much about plot. Here, his methods are a bit reminiscent of Robert Altman's, working in a genre film yet merrily indifferent to the genre's conventions - to the murder's solution, even to the tired old maxim that the cops are indistinguishable from the crooks.

Sure, in the absence of these conventions, the movie can seem less than substantial; however, with star and director so seamlessly joined in the common cause of weirdness, it's seldom less than fun. Even the dénouement comes with a wry twist, the kind that asks what role "Big Fate," that fickle dealer, really plays in our little lives. Aces, deuces, losing, winning, the hand we're dealt is always changing - but does it ever truly change us?