Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a smart and witty  drug-filled romp through an apocalyptic reflection of a post-Katrina New Orleans.  With the omnipotent guidance of master Werner Herzog driving powerful acting of Nicholas Cage, this film is sure to rock you.  What this film has that gives it that extra edge in direction that only Herzog can provide in a genre which has basically run its course, is something called momentum.  The film starts off almost painfully slow but the setting that Herzog paints initially is what keeps you interested, not so much Cage himself. Slowly but surely, the events of the film pile themselves on top of each other one at a time, until it snowballs into a properly woven tale of a modern day man’s decent from good to bad.

Post-Katrina New Orleans has been shown in the news a lot, usually in helicopter shots or in the background of a report, but never as a landscape.  The way Herzog paints Katrina makes the setting seem like the state didn’t just get hit by a hurricane, but by a nuclear bomb and is recovering from the fallout…so it’s understandable that the crime rate is up in this new fringe territory.  The character of Terence McDonagh is quite a stand-up cop and a pretty decent guy. Not the sort of guy that one would expect to become easily corrupt and by no means a Bad Lieutenant. That is until he gets hooked on this millennium’s addictive drug de jour: Vicodin!  Yes the plot-filled drug brought to you by House M.D returns to plunge yet another actor into a long stretch of both genius and decline as we see Terence’s addiction slowly grow stronger and stronger for more complicated drugs until he goes out of control using both law and chaos to get what he wants.

Nicholas Cage has been getting a bit of a bad reputation recently for being in lame movies. The Wicker Man, Knowing, Next, Ghost Rider, and World Trade Center are all films that I know make a sizable amount of people cringe at the mention of the title.  Still, it’s not as though the man can’t act, and he delivers a controlled and gripping performance, depicting a man going through a slow downward spiral from cop to crook.  In a scene, Cage can go from being a perfectly composed cop, giving orders with all the right intentions to being a crazed druggie seeing iguanas that nobody else can see and making them dance.  With a glance the man can make his inner thoughts known to the audience, but not the characters on screen, and his sense of panic and tension is so under control, the audience can actually believe that the sort of corruption that they’re viewing is plausible.  This my friends, is not the Nick Cage feared by moviegoers, but the man in a role almost catered for his sly and deliberate acting, put together by a director who knows how to bring out the most of this.

From robbing not-so innocent kids for possession of petty drugs, to conspiring with a large drug ringleader (played by Xhibit in another surprisingly fantastic role) are all elements that have been played with in corrupt cop films before.  These elements however, are always shown from the perspective that corrupt cops will always be caught. For example in such films like Training Day and clichéd lines like “nothing stinks more than a dirty cop.”  Are from a breed of films that presume that good will always win out over temptation.  Supposing however, that Ethan Hawke had indeed fallen for Denzel Washington’s scheme, what then? Well, the film would’ve turned into exactly what Bad Lieutenant is: corrupt and juicy.

-Shane Zeagman