Nicolas Cage: he's good when he's bad
Two years ago, the enigmatic Seattle-based scribe known only as “Vern”, perhaps the world’s most entertainingly original film critic, finally got around to reviewing Abel Ferrara’s cult classic Bad Lieutenant (1992). Wrapping up his comments on the enduringly controversial drama – which follows a New York cop played by Harvey Keitel wading through a self-created swamp of bad debts, bad faith, bad language and bad behaviour – he speculated, in his characteristic tangential fashion, that “maybe some kids somewhere grew up loving it and did their own remake.”
Well, here is a remake – ostensibly at least – of Bad Lieutenant But rather than passionately devoted “kids”, the director is, of all people, 67-year-old Werner Herzog, the Bavarian for whom the description “maverick auteur” might well have been invented.
Herzog’s relationship with the Ferrara movie is non-existent (“I haven’t seen it, so I can’t compare it”), his knowledge of the director similarly limited (“I’ve never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is.”) Then again, as Herzog also stated, his movie “has nothing to do with” Ferrara’s picture – sharing only the title and the basic idea of a misbehaving police officer in a major American city: in this case an utterly unbridled Nicolas Cage as Terence McDonagh, a corrupt, backache-plagued, drug-addicted lawman in an atmospheric, semi-flooded New Orleans still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.
Cage’s prolific work-rate over the past few years is reportedly due a colossal tax demand. But his semi-accidental collaboration with Herzog represents cine-serendipity of the highest order. The result is something entirely rich and strange, and which works on multiple levels. It is entirely possible to regard the picture – which co-stars Val Kilmer, rapper Xzibit (who’s surprisingly good) and Eva Mendes – as a pretty straight thriller with weird trimmings.
But it will no doubt strike many viewers, especially those familiar with the more outré crannies of Cage and Herzog’s work, as an utterly hilarious deconstruction of its own genre, punctuated with bizarre visions and behaviour which lift Bad Lieutenant into the realm of the genuinely satirical and subversive in its depiction of contemporary American “success.”
