German director Werner Herzog doesn't do normal. His lengthy and fearlessly brilliant career has involved everything. He captured a gallery of oddballs both real and fictional, turning his lens on everyone from a doomed "Grizzly Man" to "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." He's finally met his match in manic actor Nicolas Cage, and the product of their unholy union, "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," a crime drama shocks and confuses in the Big Easy, from First Look Pictures opens theaters today. It should give fans of the cultish and weird a reason to cheer, and for those seeking mainstream fare should consider themselves forewarned."Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," A powerful spiral into oblivion, works best as a study of a man in the grip of madness, magic and iguanas. The movie is not a remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 tour of New York law-enforcement hell, nor is it a sequel. According to Mr. Herzog, who has taken "Bad Lieutenant" from New York to post-Katrina New Orleans, a perceptive move that allows him to explore his cardinal themes of man's inhumanity to man and the indifference of nature in a city stripped to its swampy essence. "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is its own special fever-swamp of a movie, an anarchist film noir that seems, at times, almost as unhinged as its protagonist.
"A New Orleans mystery: A Cop So Bad, He's Good" in this Herzog's trippy new thriller, the Oscar-winning actor reunites with his "Ghost Rider" co-star Eva Mendes, and gives one of his best performances in years. Cage plays an on-the-edge and corrupted cop who's just promoted to lieutenant, and investigating the killing of five Senegalese immigrants. He plunges into drug addiction after a heroic on-the-job accident. He throws himself into this role with the energy of a man accepting a double dog dare, that lets him indulge in his most manic, unhinged mannerisms, taking viewers to the very precipice of nihilistic depravity while preserving just enough self-conscious humor to keep from tumbling in. He does some of his best work in over a decade here. Not all of it works, but it's a joy to see Cage take some risks again.
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