What on earth was director Werner Herzog thinking? If you are going to remake a controversial, tough-talking, grubbily iconic cop movie, why would you turn it into a crack-addled pantomime? Not content with incurring the wrath of Bad Lieutenant’s original co-writer and director Abel Ferrara, Herzog seems to have set out to irritate the film’s loyal fans. Whereas in the first movie, audiences were treated to a brilliant but genuinely unsettling turn from Harvey Keitel as the eponymous corrupt cop, in this version we get a sweating, gibbering Nic Cage giving free reign to his inner nutcase but failing to deliver the requisite menace.
It’s probably fair to say that the film is more of a sequel than a remake, although this is unlikely to calm the feud that has been smouldering between Herzog and Ferrara since the project was announced back in 2007. Ferrara can at least take comfort from the fact this film is unlikely match the lasting cult status of his original.
The action is relocated from New York to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s an idea with potential. The fetid, filthy waters of the flood may have receded but they serve as an evocatively pungent metaphor for the tide of crime and corruption which plagues the city’s sodden streets. Of all the swamp rats and diseased vermin that have crawled from the city’s sewers, the biggest and baddest is Lieutenant Terence McDonough (Cage), a hooker-banging, evidence snorting, criminal-bribing scumbag. The lady in his life is a high class prostitute (Eva Mendes) with a taste for the good life, along with copious amounts of cocaine and percocet, all supplied by the light-fingered Lieutenant. He has been assigned to the case of the drug-related execution of an entire family, including two young children, but although he pays lip service to the basic tenets of criminal investigation, McDonough’s primary concern is, and always will be, looking after number one.
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Vile and depraved characters can serve as a refreshing change from the more usual Hollywood tendency for flawed but essentially moral heroes. But for all his gambling and massive drug-consumption, McDonough is just not particularly interesting. Herzog’s approach to the material is workmanlike – he can clearly churn out this kind of lurid pulp in his sleep, but then so could most journeyman directors. The only moments with any flair come when the coked-up cop hallucinates that a large pair of iguanas have taken up residence on his coffee table. It’s a nicely weird segue into McDonaugh’s drug psychosis, and the film could have done with more loopy tangents of the like. Instead, with its shotgun wielding-drug dealers and debt-collecting heavies, this is a fairly run-of-the-mill exploitation flick.