Werner Herzog is quite the auteur, and so I couldn’t help but wonder why, while watching this film: why Werner? Why TBL:PoC:NO? What is this film’s reason for existence? The original, which I have vague memories of but am not convinced I’ve seen it in its entirety, is a complete conviction to excess, with all of its masturbation and shooting of radios. Here, with the remake-visioning we have the opposite: the main character is over the top, and surrounded by simplicity. It was refreshing to see Nicholas Cage be interesting, that he still has this unbridled A-Z fearlessness in him, but everything else is so typical. Where is the hunger, the drive to keep on in our merciless surroundings, that enabled (ennobled?) Harvey Keitel?
A couple of things to like: the iguanas, which seems uniquely Herzogian, but beyond there drug-implied presence, there isn’t much meaning there. Perhaps that’s just the way Herzog operates. Hey, he’s addled so let there be iguanas.
This film is a sheep in wolf’s clothing – there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done ten thousand times before in terms of a police procedural, and (yes, iguanas included) Herzog and Cage bring nothing new to the craft. Cage is good, but there’s nothing good about what he’s doing. He’s just trying to keep everything from spinning out of control, and if that’s the tether to a post-Katrina New Orleans, then it’s pretty pathetic, don’t you think?
I wish I could understand the connection between this and the previous Ferrara film from 1992. I suspect there isn’t much of one, apart from the name: Bad Lieutenant. Did Hollywood just decide it was about time an R-rated version of the NC-17 film be made? If ever there was an example of a film documenting the fact that filmmakers need to start looking elsewhere for their ideas, then this is it. This movie came out in the 90s, this “re-imagining” contains nothing original. Yes, Nicholas Cage has spoken in that nasally way before. I’m not sure he’s walked around like that, but I guess you get one thing new with the 99 old.
This movie is worth watching for one thing: Cage’s performance, and to see how exactly he holsters his gun. But does that make the film worth watching? Herzog is capable of so much more, and if his fiction trajectory is from Rescue Dawn to this, then I’m afraid he needs to sit down, eat his other shoe and either resign himself solely to documentaries or find another mountain to put a ship on top of – but then again, they’d probably do it with computers these days and that would be ruined too.
