http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/tiff/article/696297

CAGE SETS THE PIG LOOSE AS GOOD-HEARTED BAD COP


Movie Critic

Alligators and iguanas stare in disbelief at the human reptiles in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the most potent of Werner Herzog's one-two punches at TIFF '09.

Nicolas Cage takes the junkie lawman character from Abel Ferrara's 1992 original Bad Lieutenant to a whole new level of weirdness, aided by the decision to relocate the action from New York to the dank back alleys and furtive hotel rooms of post-Katrina New Orleans.

It's a powerhouse performance that deserves to be remembered come awards time.

Everybody in Herzog's vision of the Big Easy is tightly wound, tripping pharmaceutically or on the take or all three in the case of Cage's Terence McDonagh, a once-noble cop whose life has taken a tragic turn downhill.

Herzog says he instructed Cage to "set the pig loose" in his portrayal of McDonagh, and did he ever. Cage's rogue homicide cop is much more the monster than Harvey Keitel's original badged badass. He gobbles drugs of every type and potency while waving his .44 magnum to shake down crooks and regular citizens for cash and stash.

McDonagh has an appetite that could outmatch the gators and iguanas that pop up unannounced, although the critters might just be a figment of a fevered mind that is perilously close to flipping out altogether.

Yet the compromised cop is also capable of genuine tenderness, as seen in his love and devotion to a hooker junkie played with grace and empathy by Eva Mendes.

McDonagh has a crooked sidekick (and sometime rival) played by Val Kilmer, while Michael Shannon has a cameo as a police storeroom clerk, a psychic tip to the larger role he plays in My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done, Herzog's other film at TIFF.

A prologue set in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina shows how McDonagh literally fell into the abyss.

He badly injured his back making a heroic leap to rescue a prisoner who faced drowning from the rising flood waters. He was promoted to lieutenant for his bravery, but he keeps agony at bay only through the constant consumption of painkillers prescription ones, plus all the heroin and cocaine he can steal or scrounge.

He still wants to do the right thing by apprehending wrongdoers, but he also needs to feed his raging habit, which puts him in serious moral dilemmas and inclined to take dangerous risks.

The one thing driving McDonagh more than his jones for illegal stimulants is his determination to solve a multiple homicide in which an entire family was shot execution-style. There's a good cop buried somewhere inside this bad lieutenant.

Herzog and Cage both say Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans isn't really a remake of Ferrara's film, despite some structural similarities in main character and narrative.

Nor is the film really a companion piece to My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done, other than to demonstrate two times over Herzog's ability to really get beneath the skin of complicated and fascinating characters.

Peter Howell