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Dancing_P [ 8.0 ]
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While I can't really vouch for what Werner Herzog is thinking or attempting (and thank fuck for that) most of the time, this just perplexes me. Is scribe William Finkelstein's script (ostensibly meant to be, at some level, an updating of the I-don't-see-you-could-possibly-go-with-this Abel Ferrara original) a straight-up police procedural or is it MEANT to be this absolute fucking mental breakdown of a film? Is this Herzog showing us that he's above this petty cop bullshit, that there's forces at play beyond those we expect from a Nic Cage actioner, that this is subversive? I'm convinced it's meant to be funny; I just don't know at what level this idea entered the picture. Whatever the case may be, Herzog brilliantly continues his career-long obsession with insanity with this balls-to-the-wall black comedy suspense thriller that has just about fuck-all to do with the original.
Nicolas Cage is the titular lieutenant, a formerly respectable New Orleans police officer whose own sense of pity gets the best of him post-Katrina. He dives down into the flooded police station to save a trapped convict and is rewarded with a permanently fucked-up back. Strung out on painkillers and coke, he shuffles around New Orleans shaking down club kids for drugs, bringing them back to his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) and betting the money he has to a sadsack bookie (Brad Dourif). In what strikes me as a very poor judgment call, the department puts him and his partner (Val Kilmer, who may not be in on the joke considering his last couple years' worth of DTV output) on the case of the murder of an African immigrant and his family that traces back to a powerful drug kingpin (Xzibit).
Cage puts in basically the performance of a lifetime as he shambles around the frame, speaking in a squeezed, spastic tone that lapses alternately into Jimmy Stewart, Brando and Ledger's Joker. He does bumps constantly, shakes down old ladies, forces one of the club kids' girlfriends to fuck him while toking on a crack pipe and becomes enamored with iguanas (in fact, there's a recurring motif of lizards and aquatic mammals that speaks mostly to Herzog thinking animals are cool, I think). Cage's performance takes center stage; it soon becomes obvious Herzog has little to no interest in the actual mechanics of the story. That takes a back seat to the absolutely fucking barmy atmosphere of the film. Shot in indifferent digital that mirrors the majority of DTV cop flicks of the last few years, it periodically devolves into hallucinatory handheld sequences and ends with one of the most intensely over-happy endings I've ever seen. Exactly what Herzog is denouncing here is pretty hard to place: a parody of grindhouse cop thrillers is way too referential for him and a straight-up black comedy seems a bit too easy. In fact, I haven't got a fucking clue why this movie is the way it is but that's okay. I like it better this way.
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Corto [ 7.5 ]
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A good crack hazed cop movie with a bad ending. It's not even remotely a remake, thank god, and the few references to the original script could have been easily left out and call it something else and not make Abel Ferrara angry.
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DokBrowne [ 6.0 ]
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Another highly praised 2009 star vehicle (I reviewed "Crazy Heart" right before this) that underwhelmed me...all the hype had me excitedly believing it would be far more than the sum of its ingredients, but all I can say in the end is that this Werner Herzog corrupt cop procedural is precisely that: an ancient movie formula about a dirty cop with some wacky-weird sprinkles on it because of its unconventional director. If not for Herzog, I could've easily mistaken long stretches of this movie for any of a thousand different boring direct-to-DVD movies about drug dealers, police investigations, and the melodrama of low-life families. It's too often a drag. The spikes of nuttiness can be funny, surprising, and engaging, and on paper they certainly make the movie sound awesome, but they're too infrequent within the movie experience, leaving us with all that other tired crap.
Same goes for Nicolas Cage - his moments of Mega-Acting (tm Vern) don't disappoint, and he supplies even the duller parts with bits of nuance, but otherwise is too straight most of the time. Someone like, say, Robert Downey Jr. could find a way to keep you riveted in every scene, but Cage disengages into a simmer when there's nothing strange going on.
The ending's good, however. At first I was baffled by its point, but the more I think about it, it works and on multiple levels at that. More ambiguity and thoughtfulness (or just more crazy shit like dancing souls and iguana-cam) would've made a more valuable movie
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jeff_v [ 7.5 ]
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Abel Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant is the only movie of his that I've liked, and Herzog's re-imagining takes the piss out of it (and all other "cop on the edge" stories) pretty well. It took me a bit to really get it, but once it clicked I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'd like to leave the particulars un-mentioned, since it would be nice to enter the film stone cold, but there are some good batshit moments, highlighted by a call-out to Stroszek that's up there with the Bill Murray scenes in Zombieland as the meta-movie moments of 2009. Also, for some reason Val Kilmer is in this picture.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.9 |
| No. Ratings | : 4 | |
| No. Reviews | : 4 | |
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