PLOT A drug-fueled cop rampages through post-Katrina New Orleans.
CAST Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Alvin "Xzibit" Joyner
LENGTH 2:01
PLAYING AT Sag Harbor Cinema
BOTTOM LINE An unclassifiable masterpiece, with Cage delivering his best performance in years.
One of the best lines from Werner Herzog's wondrously bizarre film "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," isn't in the movie but in the press kit, which contains this statement from the famously self-aggrandizing director: "I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers."
Game on! Back in 1992, rogue director Abel Ferrara released "Bad Lieutenant," starring Harvey Keitel as a New York cop run amok on society's margins. It was a social critique, deeply transgressive and a narrative disaster. In other words, Herzog ("Fitzcarraldo," "Stroszek") had been out-Herzogged.
It took a while, but he responded: Now Nicolas Cage is the drug-snorting lieutenant, supported by a terrific cast that includes Eva Mendes as a hooker and the rapper Alvin "Xzibit" Joyner as the ghetto kingpin Big Fate. The new setting is post-Katrina New Orleans; society's margins, indeed.
Instead of one-upping Ferrara - this is not quite a remake - Herzog feints left, creating a poker-faced, surreal satire of the cop genre. (The screenplay comes from television veteran William Finkelstein.) Herzog also gets Cage to deliver his best performance in years simply by pushing him to his nervous, giggling extremes. In this cinematic theoretician's humble opinion, "Bad Lieutenant" is madly, wildly brilliant.
firstlook studios photo - Nicolas Cage plays a drug-snorting lieutenant, and Eva Mendes is a hooker.
