7/10
A marvelous film that oddly ties all the elements to a piece.
9 February 2010
BAD LIEUTENANT, known by most as Abel Ferrara's 1992 film with Harvey Keitel, has got a homonym with Werner Herzog's already forgotten BAD LIEUTENANT - a loose, limber, hilariously weird, and greatly entertaining cop-film with a hysterical (not necessarily funny) Nicolas Cage. The film is greatly set in a beautiful New Orleans slightly before and after the Hurricane Katrina, here rogue detective Terrence McDonagh (Cage) operates under the heavy influence of drugs - drugs he can't shake himself off after an incident that caused him severe back injury. Together with the hooker (Eva Mendes suiting it perfectly) he loves, his life complicates as they descend into both the grizzly underworld of crime, and their own trippy state of mind. Director Herzog stated himself that in contradiction to the 1992-film (which he states he hasn't seen) which themed the burden of guilt, his film is about the bliss of evil. Under the direction of Herzog we're taken on a wry journey to hell where evil takes on the form of deliriously cooked characters and atmosphere, containing a performance by Cage that spans from him wielding a gun at a wheelchair-bound old lady and calling her a cu*t (while shaving!), to him sharing an intimate moment with Frankie (Mendes) in his childhood hideaway recalling memories from when he was a boy, and how he imagined pirates hiding treasures in his home garden. And it's a scene to notice, because Herzog is a master of creating weirdly unique romances, and this one is right up there with the love triangle in Nosferatu (1979). And Herzog is the skipper of a film that oddly makes just about everything work to its benefit - just take a look at the scenes where he rhythmically zooms and cuts with noxious effect on close-ups of iguanas and you'll see what I mean.
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