TIFF 09: BAD LIEUTENANT PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS Review

Put all thoughts of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant out of your mind.  With the exception of the title - which he tried to wiggle out of - Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Herzog's film has nothing whatsoever to do with Ferrara's.  It is, however, as fine an example of gonzo film making that you are ever likely to come across - a gleeful subversion of the American Dream that delights in poking pins into every sacred cow of Action film making.  It is raucous, rude, outrageous and features the triumphant return of Good Nick, the Nicolas Cage we haven't caught sight of since 2002's Adaptation, the wild-eyed crazy man who proves an utterly source of inspiration for Herzog to sink his teeth into.  This is an actor-director team up to dream of and you can only hope it is the start of a long and fruitful collaboration between the two.  I have no clue whatsoever what Hollywood will do with this film but, god damn, is it ever entertaining.

Cage is Terence McDonagh an utterly crass and amoral cop in New Orleans, utterly disillusioned with humanity and adrift in a sea of his own impulses.  And this is before an injury sustained while saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina leaves him in constant pain and with a vicious drug habit. 

But along with the habit, the accident brings McDonagh a promotion, a promotion that makes him the lead detective in a quintuple homicide case, a case that counted two young children among the slain and a powerful local drug dealer as the prime suspect.  If he's got the time to spare between hooking up with his hooker girlfriend, shaking down club goers for drugs and dodging his gambling debts, McDonagh may even put some time in to tracking down the killer.

A chronicle of one man's ever increasing spiral into deeper and deeper levels of addiction addiction, Bad Lieutenant absolutely revels in its own depravity.  It adores the fact that McDonagh is the sort who would pull a gun on an old woman to make her give up her own grandchild, it giggles as McDonagh forces the college kid he's just shaken down for drugs to watch as he then fucks the kid's girlfriend before allowing the pair to go.  It is rude and crass and gloriously so, not just pushing the envelope but tearing it into tiny little pieces, lighting the pieces on fire and then baking the ashes into a batch of hash brownies.  It is immensely quotable and so loaded with odd and surprising moments that any attempt to discuss story risks simply devolving into a recitation of favorite moments.

But there's a lot more going on here than just a string of MPAA-infuriating moments.  Seen from a step back, Bad Lieutenant is an obvious and deliberate jab at the accepted excesses of American action film, a point made loud and hysterically clear by a single shot end sequence that makes it clear God - at least the God of American movies - smiles down on McDonagh and his ilk.  America is the land of the cowboy, after all?  Right?  Right?

I cannot for the life of me picture this film getting any sort of wide theatrical release, though with Cage in the lead it is not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.  But however it gets out there, though, it needs to get out there.  This one needs to be seen.