THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL – NEW ORLEANS (2009)
Posted by Daniel Metz
Dir. Werner Herzog
Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, 11/19/09, 7:30pm
This movie rocks to the break of dawn! Herzog’s most recent film, playing now in select cities but hopefully due for a proper Austin release on December 11 (the day that Psycho begins in Phoenix, Arizona), is a meditation on madness. This is Herzog’s usual subject, and he tackles it with the skill of a filmmaker who has been sitting pretty in the pantheon for decades. This time, unlike the documentaries he has been making for the past few years, Herzog has made an action-thriller. I mention a Hollywood genre carefully, remembering how he and his contemporaries in the New German Cinema toyed with American genre film back in the 1960s and ’70s. While it looks like a genre film, packed with genre actors Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendez, and Xzibit (now going by the much classier nom, Alvin ‘Xzibit’ Joiner), it is much more than that.
Beauty and the beast
The reason for its transcendence into brilliance is Nick Cage. My knowledge of his movies is pretty thin because I stray from rubbish, but I have seen enough to know that underneath the star of World Trade Center and Ghost Rider is a decent actor with quite a bit of power. He unleashes all of that power to create the character Terence McDonagh, a drug addicted cop with a heart despite all appearances. He performs at volume 11 throughout the film, representing some of the craziest crazy I’ve seen in a long time. His hallucinations, his rapid mind, and his bravado hustling are all a pleasure to watch and laugh at. He really carries this movie with his disgusting yet magnetic character. A.O. Scott of the New York Times writes that describing Cage’s performance, “requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged,” and that may be the best way to put it.
The raised eyebrow draws a huge laugh during this shakedown
There is a lot to like about this picture. The portrait of New Orleans is brutal. The filmmaking is fun yet quite dark, and the humor, perhaps because of the bleakness of the setting, punches really hard. Every supporting actor (Mendez, Xzibit, Val Kilmer, Gentlemen Bronco’s Jennifer Coolidge) is strong, too.
I could say more, but I want to allow Stephen, the bigger Herzog fan, room for his soul to dance. Read his review here.
There are 2 Comments to "THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL – NEW ORLEANS (2009)"
[...] this film came at the tail end of a lazy triple feature: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men at 5 and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans at 7:30. As such, I was definitely tired and this film’s careful slowness did not help [...]
[...] pretty blind and I was so pleased. This is a magnificent film, and Herzog, after his magnificent The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, is certainly on fire. Both pictures of his double-whammy are in the top films of the year, and for [...]