Over-the-top 'Bad Lieutenant' role is a fit for Cage

When Nicolas Cage goes over the top, it’s something to watch. He winces. He rages with cold-eyed indignation. The world is always against him, but he isn’t surrendering quietly. With “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans,” Cage has found a part that allows him to overact outrageously and still be firmly within the demands of the role.

Cage is always best when he plays weird underdogs –like early in his career when he ate a live cockroach for one scene (“Vampire’s Kiss,” 1988) or when he played an Elvis imitator in a snakeskin coat (“Wild at Heart,” 1990).

Cage’s career went haywire when some producer decided he should be a leading-man kind of hero. His friend Sean Penn accused him of selling out. So did some critics.

Lt. Terence McDonagh is a return to the characters he plays best. He’s a drug addict, a rapist and, occasionally, a murderer. He’s among the dirtiest in a long history of dirty cops in the movies.

There is no Serpico here to turn him in. He is quite casual and deadpan about how he steals drugs from the police evidence room. Spotting a couple leaving a club, he pretends to arrest the guy to get his drugs and then rapes the girlfriend, getting a kick out of the fact that her boyfriend is made to watch. Mistakenly taking heroin rather than cocaine, he crawls to his prostitute-girlfriend’s lair to seek some kind of cure, or solace.

This is our hero?

German icon Werner Herzog, 67, directed this, ensuring that it played several film festivals (including Toronto) and opens here at the art house Naro rather than at a mall multiplex. It’s unusual for a Nicolas Cage movie to open in an art house.

This is Cage’s best role since his Oscar-winning alcoholic in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), which actually isn’t saying that much.

Wasn’t there another movie called “Bad Lieutenant”? Yes, there was, and this one admits that it is “re-imagining” Abel Ferrara’s 1992 “Bad Lieutenant,” which starred Harvey Keitel. Like Cage’s character, Keitel played a dirty, drug addicted cop. In Keitel’s case, he insisted on getting naked to the degree that it was only the second American film to get an NC-17 rating.

This new film has little to do with its earlier namesake other than drugs and dirty cops. The first film was set in New York City. This one is set in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a factor that lends some interest and, perhaps, some excuse for the lawlessness and depravity – but not much.

Seemingly obsessed with alligators and iguanas, Herzog gives us several close-ups of reptile eyes for no particular reason other than to give us the creeps.

Open drug deals take place in the police station and all clues surrounding a five-killing massacre lead to a drug king known as Big Fate.

Cage seems to be doing an imitation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame as he stoops continually to suggest a back injury. As corrupt as the character is, he still has a vague code of ethics in that he goes after the criminals (even if they are seldom more criminal than himself).

Eva Mendes is no less than movie-star gorgeous, but as the prostitute Frankie she has little to do except merely look gorgeous. The ever-trashy and delightfully low-rent Jennifer Coolidge scores again in her role as a country slut who prides herself on drinking nothing stronger than beer, though she never stops drinking. Like everyone else here, she plays it deadpan but is still hilarious.

Repetitive in its insistence that human beings are universally corrupt, this “Bad Lieutenant” shifts abruptly for a final suggestion of a sort of redemption. By then, we have been beaten into submission – except for the moments we were laughing at the excess of it all.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347,

mal.vincent@pilotonline.com