Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009)
I would love to run the credits experiment on Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: remove director Werner Herzog’s name, replace with an unknown, maybe, I don’t know, Jaume Collet-Serra (his Orphan, far superior, could’ve used a bit of BL’s critical benefit of the doubt), and recalibrate the press’ response. The picture might get a few positive reviews anyway, it still has enough in the vaguely relevant satire department to register with a number of paid writers: New Orleans post-Katrina, Nic Cage in a consciously wiggy Vampire’s Kiss, apologetic-for-past-paychecks performance, a bad script performed with so straight a face it must be satire, etc. The picture has its moments, but it’s a workshop, not a movie, its talented people playing an on-set game of Mystery Science Theatre 3000: you get the straight-faced version of the lame scene right along with a slightly-off riff on the same lame scene.
It’s nice to see Nic having fun again; I’m somewhat sympathetic to his run of bad action movies, they’re more personal than many acclaimed contemporary performances in that they are clearly the work of a talented man having a mid-life crisis. Cage has as much conviction in his work in Con Air or Knowing as he does in Vampire’s Kiss or Leaving Las Vegas; the poignancy is in everyone else’s knowledge that that conviction is misplaced. In Bad Lieutenant, Cage is in on the joke, and, while there are a few bits in amusingly bad taste – such as a new version of the road-side sexual assault from the Keitel/Ferrara picture – its mostly just predictable, stale, self-amusement. This new picture is a post-modern, hip illustration of Farber’s gimp string: Cage/Herzog will stage 15 uninterrupted minutes of cop procedural that wouldn’t pass muster on Law and Order, and then justify it with a pull of calculated weirdness: a seemingly five minute lizard point of view, a break dancing soul, or a Jennifer Coolidge as a drunk in her worst performance.
There are things to admire: the flooded prison opening, Shea Wigham in a Michael Shannon performance (the real Michael Shannon also appears) and Eva Mendes is funny in a brief, purposefully thankless role, I’ve long suspected that she’s a better actress than her curves or lips will allow. The picture also has a nice way of allowing the worst thing possible in any given scene to actually happen, it parodies that pretend-humanity that most cop-thrillers revel in to excuse their bloodshed. Cage’s cop does whatever he pleases whenever he pleases, flips loyalties whenever it conveniences him, and nothing ever comes from it. The characters are gleefully mercenary and racist, and the equal-opportunity racism (everyone hates everyone) strikes me as more honest and potentially hope-affirming than the labored democracy of pictures like Forrest Gump, Crash, and probably The Blind Side and Precious. As a gangster everyone knows killed someone no one really cares about, Xzibit potentially upstages everyone else in the picture – his disbelief that a white man, let along a cop, would bother to smoke his crack is the closest this Lieutenant comes to being human.
I had high hopes for Bad Lieutenant and was left wondering what all the fuss was about. Not nearly as bad as its festival detractors would have you believe, nor as good as the assembled talent might lead you to expect.
It so desperately wanted to fly off the rails, but it mostly remained disappointingly ordinary.