This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Werner Herzog is not a flattering director. If you want to star in a film with a director who will go out of his way to fill the screen with only your best side, only your most positive performance, Herzog is not the director for you. Herzog likes things in a state of entropy: any given system’s tendency toward spontaneous change progressing in the direction of ever-increasing disorder. Which is why in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, he shoots both the city of New Orleans and his star, Nicholas Cage, as distastefully and unattractively as possible. Inexorably tied to one another, both the city and the man have succumbed to debilitating disasters, and Herzog is there to document the entropy with a sort of childlike glee reserved only for sadists. Lucky for us, it’s a beguiling and entertaining ride all the way to the end.

The plot of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans really isn’t all that important. This is a visceral movie. Herzog wants you to feel it. And you will. The film opens during Hurricane Katrina. In an act of spontaneous and reckless charity, a cop, Terence McDonagh (Cage), is severally injured and told he will live the rest of his life with incapacitating back pain. Even while he’s promoted and publicly acknowledged for his bravery, McDonagh begins self-medicating with cocaine and heroin. He prowls a mostly abandoned, lawless city at night, a gun tucked haphazardly into the front of his pants. He is capable of anything.

He stops a young couple coming out of a nightclub and finds a paltry amount of drugs. The man pleads for mercy and offers a bribe. McDonagh isn’t interested in the money, only the drugs. That the woman offers herself to him while her boyfriend watches is just the icing on the cake. McDonagh steals from the evidence room, from other addicts, even from the dealers he shakes down, including a kingpin he’s investigating for multiple murders, played by hip-hop star Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner. McDonagh’s girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes) is a call girl with a similar habit. It works for them. Thing get complicated when McDonagh’s bookie (he’s also addicted to gambling, though technically, only as a way to feed his first habit) comes looking to collect and later, an internal-affairs investigation is launched. Yet through it all, McDonagh clings to an upended sense of professionalism. The obviously corrupt cop may use his job to feed his awful appetites, but he is still takes his job seriously.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans shares nothing in common with the 1992 film with which it shares half a name other than the bird’s eye view story of a degenerate cop addicted to drugs. Despite his vast experience, Herzog still makes amateurish-looking films. His cameras never rest languidly or glide gracefully, they jolt and run and stop short as if everything is filmed through some unknown observer’s POV. He dwells on off-kilter details most directors never see or care to reveal. He seems to take his directing cues from the muddled, poetic possibilities of his main character’s drug-induced mania. The result is both jarring and picturesque, incontrovertibly weird yet undeniably pleasurable.

Herzog has found his American Klaus Kinski. Just as Herzog and Kinski were born to make movies together, so too were Herzog and Cage. Cage’s overacting, a liability in most films, is indispensable here. Usually Cage acts crazy while portraying normal. But in Bad Lieutenant, he is allowed to act crazy while portraying crazy and as a result, for the first time in countless years, Cage offers a fearless performance that is an unmitigated joy to watch. He is deliciously unhinged, stark raving mad, with eyes to match. He stumbles around the film, a Quasimodo caricature, looking like death warmed over, paranoid and given to hallucinations and spontaneous outbursts.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is a magnificent mess of the sort only Herzog can get away with making. It is not a masterpiece, but it is unquestionably the work of a master who has spent decades looking into the mouth of madness (and occasionally jumping in). Herzog has made a career of pursuing nutty, obsessive men on unreasonable quests (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) and Bad Lieutenant, while not rising to those prior heights, is still, unmistakably, part of the family.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.