The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: His Soul Is Still Dancing
Wow.
Fucking. Wow.
I came into BL:PoCNO fresh off the heels of the hour and a half long boredom parade that was The Runner, and holy fucking shit, THIS movie is how Nicolas Cage should be used.
In Bag New Tenant: Pork of Cold Two Orleans, Nicolas Cage plays a crooked cop named Terrence McDonagh. Steeped in drugs, sex, gambling, drugs, debt, sex, more debt, drugs, and a quintuple homicide case, Cage barrels through the movie with unpredictable energy that launches out of him at completely inappropriate and perfect intervals.
To be clear, Sad Lou Bega: Fallout Boy Stu Orleans is not a story about a corrupt cop, or a homicide, or a drug cartel. It’s a story about an already dangerously unhinged man becoming more unhinged and flying wildly off the rails as life collapses and explodes around him without him giving a flying fuck about anybody but himself. It is a celebration and lamentation of the world and it’s ups and downs, the forward movement of society, and wasting the small amount of time we are given in this world.
A theme that appears toward the beginning of the movie is a feeling of being trapped and unable to affect the world around you. As Cage prods around the quintuple murder scene, he finds a small Betta fish in a glass, next to a poem written by the deceased about the fish. Toward the end of the movie, Cage asks another character if he believes fish have dreams. The final scene features Cage and the other character sitting silently in a hotel aquarium, surrounded by sharks and schools of exotic fish. Cage chuckles to himself.
My theory is that early in the movie, Cage’s character is cursed through his own corrupt actions; I think either at the very beginning, when he begrudgingly saves a prisoner’s life, or shortly after, when he shakes down a couple coming out of a club so he can smoke crack and get the girlfriend to fuck him in front of her boyfriend. The rest of the film shows his character desperately trying to tie things together as they unravel twice as fast. His gambling doesn’t pay off, he falls deeper and deeper into his addiction, he gets entangled with drug dealers and debtors.
Then, towards the end, right as all hope is seemingly lost, everything magically fixes itself. The case, the gambling, the debt, everything solves itself. He quits drinking and doing drugs, marries the wonderfully talented Eva Mendes, buys a house, gets a promotion, and presumably lives a full year clean and sober. Then he shakes down a different couple coming out of the same club and finds himself back in a hotel room doing coke.
There are many layers to David Tennant: Doctor Who Blue Orleans, but I think that Herzog and Cage have also laid a trap beckoning those toward the deep end of analysis and dissection. I think that there is a simple explanation, but that the simple explanation is hidden underneath a mountain of wildness and insanity and unreality.
This film hit six and a half Cagemarks.
He appears from behind a door shaving with an electric razor.
Every other line in this movie makes no god damn sense, so we got tons of weird dialogue.
Overacting and underacting abound, especially in the latter half of the movie.
At one point Cage threatens to shoot a child, so that’s describing violence.
He kisses Eva Mendes and has another unnamed woman fuck him in front of her boyfriend as a bribe, so that’s kissing and more.
I’m giving half a Cagemark for the Cage Scream, because while we don’t ever get a full-fledged Cage Scream, so many of the lines in this film are barked at a deafening level that it’s gotta count for something.
Cage never pops his shirt off, and we never see him running because of a limp the character has.
This is Cage at the top of his game. William M. Finkelstein’s screenplay demands a wild and insane character in the lead role, and Herzog and Cage do an incredible job at pushing the limits of this character in a world that is simultaneously terrified and amused by him. At one point he cuts off an old lady’s air supply while interrogating her elderly nurse before bellowing “YOU’RE WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA!” There is an absolute beauty in Cage’s roller coaster performance.
I cannot recommend this movie enough to anybody who is looking for peak Cage. This is a role that was made for him, and Herzog directs the living shit out of this movie. It’s weird, gross, fucked up, unpleasant, hilarious, terrifying, confusing, and ultimately, it’s just Cage going balls to the wall Cage.
May you find out what these fucking iguanas are doing on your coffee table,
Nat
