Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), a homicide detective with the New Orleans Police Department, is promoted to Lieutenant after he saves a prisoner from drowning in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, during his heroic act, he severely injures his back and is put on prescription pain medication. A year later, Terence – struggling with his addictions to sex, Vicodin and cocaine – finds himself in the battle to bring down drug dealer Big Fate, who is suspected of massacring an entire family of African immigrants.

TIFF: There has been tremendous speculation ever since news broke that the incomparable Werner Herzog was mounting a remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. But the furor has proved unfounded, as Herzog's film comes from a new script. The only resemblance to the original is that it portrays a cop whose moral compass is spinning from excessive drug use.

After severely injuring his back while saving a prisoner from drowning in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, homicide detective Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is promoted to lieutenant, prescribed painkillers and returned to active duty. A year later, he is addicted to both Vicodin and cocaine. But his responsibilities to the force continue, and when a family of African immigrants is found massacred, Terence is handed the case by his superiors.

In the convoluted moral universe in which Terence lives, it's possible to be a protective boyfriend to his escort girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes), look after a witness wanted by a notorious drug dealer (played by car-modifying rapper Xzibit), score drugs from intimidated club kids, regularly hallucinate about reptiles, have a lucky crack pipe and still somehow be charged with protecting the general public.

The viewer rides shotgun with Cage as he prowls the depopulated New Orleans in this improbable pairing of Leaving Las Vegas and Grand Theft Auto. Under Herzog's direction, Cage delivers another in his roster of off-the-chain performances, bursting with non sequiturs bound to become notable cult film quotations, including “What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?” and “Shoot him again – his soul is still dancing.”

It is Herzog's documentarian's eye that brings an extra depth to what at first appears to be a common cops-and-robbers crime flick. He constantly frames the devastated New Orleans with heartbreaking poverty and ruin in the foreground and the gleaming metal towers of affluence in the background. Herzog's tendency to focus on deluded (if not outright delusional) figures trying to eke out some kind of salvation against jungles both real and allegorical is now legendary, and this story takes on urgent resonance in a twenty-first-century American city trying to start from scratch.

Colin Geddes