Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans” hits theaters this weekend (November 20). It’s… an interesting picture, but not an entirely successful one. One our writers just saw it and in an email to me called it a “fascinating trainwreck,” which is a pretty apt way of describing it.
There’s absurdist highs, confused, ridiculous lows and as a front-to-back picture, it’s not great. If you’re looking for that shock and awe of “ecstatic truth” Herzog usually delivers (something so absurd or loony it becomes beautiful) it only arrives once, ever so briefly in the “spoon” scene with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes (easily the film’s best sequence, notably sincere for once).
However, if you graduated with a masters in irony (and are young-ish manboy), you might just enjoy it for it’s ludicrous value. There are laughs, but being honest about it (and with our critical faculties working), it’s not Werner Herzog’s best work (he’s had problems with narrative in recent years and is better at docs), it’s a bit of a mess (he doesn’t give a shit about plot and it shows) and just because Nicolas Cage delivers a wild performance doesn’t mean it’s as good as the classic feral Nicolas Cage performances of yore (though many are misguidedly mistaking Nic Cage doing ridiculous things in this picture as indisputable truth of a stellar performance). Anyhow, read our full review written at TIFF. And note: Although when we say, “this weekend,” it’s actually in a limited release right now that will expand later.
