Load up on guns, bring your friends; the Bad Lieutenant is back.
How you can you be badder than Bad Lieutenant? You can't, really, but by dusting off a rusty Nicolas Cage, dropping him in the by-default trashy post-Katrina New Orleans, and throwing in a whole lot of animals, Werner Herzog's fresh, new take on the ultra-gritty original proves an admirable-enough attempt. Much like its lead performance, Bad Lieutentant: Port of Call New Orleans often tries too hard, but ends up with a sort of inverted (and twisted) sense of humor as a result.
Nicolas Cage takes up the reigns as the titular antihero, this time given a name: Terence McDonagh. With the help of his fat, sleazy partner (Val Kilmer, putting the ease in sleaze!), the two investigate the murders of five Senegalese immigrants ultimately perpetrated by a local gangster (Xzibit). Popping along the way are a handful of interesting characters and a handful more of uninteresting; the main focus here is on Cage doing his 'ol' crazy thang' and interacting with a bunch of sometimes-imaginary animals. With so much on his shoulders, Cage hits some of the marks, misses others, but does proves capable of carrying the craziness. A lot of the time you wish he and Herzog could've gone more hardcore (i.e. Ferrara and Keitel), or simply crazier, but it'll do, Cage, it'll do, Herzog.
What doesn't disappoint is the picture-perfect New Orleans casting. The likes of Kilmer (sleazy + fat = wonderful) and freakshow rejects Fairzua Balk, Brad Dourif, and Michael Shannon bring some much-needed grit to the picture, with Xzibit and Eva Mendes adding some modern flair (there's something so mid-'00s about them—it's uncanny!). But even then, the great cast feels vastly underused, as we spend too much time on unnecessary sideplots and characters in an ultimately overlong picture.
Like with David Lynch's Wild at Heart, as I mentioned—the film feels like it's trying extra hard to be crazy, but when you put forth that much effort, something's got to come out a success. And something does, though not everything, in this remake (it is a remake, not a 'retinkering,' not a 'different take' or whatever else you want to call it, but just another remake) of Abel Ferrara's 1992 original with Harvey Keitel. It's as if Herzog and Cage took a look at the source character and said, "[Let's] shoot him again, his soul is still dancing."
**1/2 out of ****
~ Patrick Fryberger
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