Shock News: Bad Liutenant Remake Starring Nic Cage Gets Good Review!

Hardrain

4/5 in todays Guardian

Wonder of wonders: The Bad Lieutenant remake is not actually bad at all. German film-maker Werner Herzog has taken Abel Ferrara's 1992 saga by the scruff of the neck, shifted the action from New York to New Orleans and cast Nicolas Cage in the old Harvey Keitel role, as a morally bankrupt law enforcer. The purists are raging and Ferrara is incensed. If ever a movie arrives hexed with dark voodoo, this movie is it.


And yet Herzog's devil-may-care insouciance has paid off brilliantly. He does not retread Bad Lieutenant so much as reinvent it. Out goes Ferrara's dark marinade of blood, semen and Catholic guilt. In comes an espresso of caffeine and amphetamines that, in its way, is just as effective.
Cage gives what is surely his best performance in years as Terence McDonough, a New Orleans cop with a bad back and a faulty moral compass. His shoulders are hitched up around his ears as he picks his way gingerly around New Orleans. In his heightened state he is liable to laugh at just about anything (one street hoodlum goes by the name of "G" and this he finds endlessly amusing). The fact that McDonough is accompanied on some of his errands by sidekick played by puffy, paunchy Val Kilmer only adds to the film's air of gleeful corruption.



One has the sense that, in his sly fashion, Herzog is somehow getting off on the sight of these two Hollywood golden boys run hopelessly to seed.
McDonough is nominally spearheading the investigation of a local crime boss ("Big Fate"), though before long he's veering dangerously off the map. He busts small-time dealers and pockets their stash and pulls a gun on a respectable old lady at the local care-home, while his gallant attempt to ride to the rescue of his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) ends in disaster. Finally, he is yanked off the case and demoted to the property room, where the drug seizures are stored. That's like giving a fox the keys to the chicken coop.


Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, like the lieutenant himself, is wild, ill-disciplined and never less than mesmerising. Even when it seems to be sticking doggedly to the script, there's something wonky and dangerous about this film. Herzog takes one of the oldest genre cliches in the book (the Maverick Cop Who Gets Results) and then sees how far he can twist it before it snaps.


This, I suppose, is simply par for the course. Werner Herzog has made good movies and bad movies. But he is not a man to feel pinched by his material, or daunted by an illustrious predecessor. Here he takes Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and makes it gloriously, shamelessly his own.

johnny_ultimate

I've never seen Bad Lieutenant, but Herzog is a good director, or at his worst at least an interesting and slightly insane one. Will be interesting to see him handle this kind of material, as long as there are no scenes of Nicholas Cage going insane in a jungle, which is one of Herzog's favourite themes (although he always handles it well).

O/T: I love this clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXqc8TQ15w

uncleoswald

The trailer was posted here awhile ago to much derision. I always thought at the very least it looked like fun. Whatever else you think of Cage he can do wild eyed crazy like no one else in Hollywood and that is what Herzog specializes in.

I also have no issue with them messing with the original as they seem to share nothing apart from the name and more importantly its not a favourite of mine anyways.

Looking forward to it.

bnt

Roger Ebert had this to say, in advance of the Toronto International Film Festival:

... the film I anticipate most of all is "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," by Herzog. Nicolas Cage, an actor who was born to work with Herzog, plays a New Orleans cop who is rotten to the core. The film's title and the rotten cop, but apparently not much else, are borrowed from Abel Ferrara's 1992 film, chosen by Martin Scorsese as one of the ten best films of the 1990s. The Herzog film just premiered at Venice to good reviews. If ever there was a director incapable of merely "remaking" someone else's film, that would be Werner Herzog.

Hmmm ...

thrillisgone

I've been looking for it online but cant find it.. Does anyone know when its going to be released in Ireland?

Notorious

thrillisgone wrote: »

I've been looking for it online but cant find it.. Does anyone know when its going to be released in Ireland?

I've also been looking through all of Dublin's cinemas for a screening. It looks like New Moon is taking most of the cinema slots this week.

Anyone?

I saw an early version of it a few months back and really liked it. Cage actually tries to act which marks his first attempt since Leaving Las vegas

MikeC101

Deleted User wrote: »

I saw an early version of it a few months back and really liked it. Cage actually tries to act which marks his first attempt since Leaving Las vegas

What about Adaptation? (another film where he played a screenwriter oddly enough)

Duggy747

With the word surrounding this remake and with Werner at the helm I always got the sense this was the movie Cage badly, badly needed to get back on form.

I was never fond of him but I give him credit for the fact that he can act when he feels like it.

I'll never forgive him for Knowing, at least in The Wicker Man I laughed my ass off.

Heh heh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGji3kDeNoU

qwertplaywert

MikeC101 wrote: »

What about Adaptation? (another film where he played a screenwriter oddly enough)

I actually thought Adaptation was one of his best ever preformances, up there with Leaving Las Vagas and Raising Arizonia . It'll be interesting to see if he goes back to being of the most interesting actors working today, or continues on his quest to be NUMBER 1 ACTION HERO