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Your Humble Reviewer doesn’t under­stand the intense anti-Nicholas Cage bias that has become a pop­u­lar meme with film cultists in the last few years.  Sure, he’s done a lot of big-budget dreck… but so have tons of other Hollywood names, past and present.  Besides, no one was going to be able to save duds like Ghost Rider, 8mm or that awful redux of The Wicker Man.  His rep­u­ta­tion has also taken a beat­ing from the tabloids over the last decade or so, what with the tra­vails of his love life and his finan­cial prob­lems, and that makes it eas­ier for some to think of him as a joke.

However, using the above rea­sons as an excuse to deny his tal­ent is just lazy think­ing.   Cage should actu­ally be thanked for his crazy per­for­mances in bad movies — he pro­vides an ele­ment of inspi­ra­tion and unpre­dictabil­ity amidst all the megabucks empti­ness and allows the writ­ers, direc­tors and execs respon­si­ble for the real prob­lems in said films to escape unscathed.  It’s more of a fair crit­i­cism to say he doesn’t pick enough work wor­thy of his tal­ent or fear­less­ness — because when he picks a wor­thy role, you’re reminded what a gutsy, unfor­get­table actor he really is.

For a great exam­ple of how Cage’s unusual tal­ents can be used well, one need look no fur­ther than Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call, New Orleans.  It was vil­i­fied long before it hit movie screens, namely because of the endur­ing and under­stand­able respect every­one has for the Abel Ferrara orig­i­nal.  That said, this is no remake.  Instead, Herzog and Cage have used the title and con­cept as a jumping-off point for a black com­edy that over­flows with their own spe­cial brand of cin­e­matic brinksmanship.

On the sur­face, it’s pure schlock that fol­lows a tra­jec­tory famil­iar to any­one who has watched cop shows or direct-to-video thrillers in the last few decades.  Terence McDonagh (Cage) is a cop in Katrina-era New Orleans who injured his back sav­ing a pris­oner from a flooded jail cell.  After the acci­dent, he lives in a haze of pain meds and ille­gal drugs with a live-in hooker girl­friend (Eva Mendes) as he tries to get by.  His messy life gets fur­ther com­pli­cated when he starts to inves­ti­gate the execution-style killing of an immi­grant fam­ily by a drug dealer (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner).  As he tries to put a case together, he jug­gles his many per­sonal and pub­lic demons in a cir­cus act that gets cra­zier by the second.

However, that plot sum­mary doesn’t begin to hint at the live-wire inten­sity that Cage brings to the table.  For once, his quirks have a per­fect, jus­ti­fied vehi­cle.  Walking with a per­pet­ual slant due to his omnipresent back pain and loaded up with any num­ber of drugs, McDonagh is capa­ble of burst­ing into laugh­ter, rage or an eso­teric mono­logue at any given moment.  Cage’s skill for off­beat yet com­mit­ted flights of Method-acting fancy mir­rors the char­ac­ter per­fectly.  You get a lit­tle bit of every­thing Cage can do, from quiet inten­sity to oper­atic fury — and there’s never a false note hit any­where in-between.  What’s more, you’ll never know what he’s going to do next.  He pro­vides the kind of white-knuckle excite­ment we haven’t got­ten from him since Vampire’s Kiss.

Cage’s brave work ben­e­fits from its han­dling by a direc­tor who is every bit as fear­less and com­mit­ted to doing the unex­pected.  In fact, Herzog’s direc­tion does behind the cam­era what Cage is doing in front of the cam­era.  A clichéd scene where Cage with­holds oxy­gen from a wealthy old lady to get info morphs into some­thing else when Cage is allowed to launch into a rant where he exco­ri­ates her for the sym­bolic role she has played in ruin­ing the coun­try.  A scene in a stake­out room stops dead so we can get a closeup of the igua­nas that Cage is hal­lu­ci­nat­ing (!) while an impas­sioned swamp-soul cover of “Release Me” blares on the sound­track.  Herzog’s sur­re­al­ist black-comedy approach to his mate­r­ial is furi­ously and unpre­dictably alive, just like his lead actor’s performance.

In sum­ma­tion, The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call, New Orleans might be lit­tle more than a lark for Cage and Herzog but their tag-team eccen­tric­ity gives it the unpre­dictable twists and the kind of wild energy that future cult films are made of.  The com­bined force of their work is rem­i­nis­cent of a key scene from the film: after some drug-dealer friends shoot up a loan­shark on his behalf, Cage tells them to shoot him again because “his soul is still danc­ing” — cut to an image of a dou­ble dressed like the dead man break­danc­ing furi­ously.  With this film, Cage and Herzog both are break­danc­ing their way  through a for­mula setup en route to artis­tic tran­scen­dence.  All Your Humble Reviewer has to say in response is “Go, cat, GO!!!”