Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

It was unlikely that Werner Herzog’s re-visitation of the Abel Ferrara cult classic Bad Lieutenant was ever going to be as funny as the directorial war of words it provoked back in 2007. With Ferrara in the anti-remake corner crying “Burn in Hell” and the hubristic Herzog in the other howling “fight the windmills”, the stage was set for the kind of epic battle of wills that are Herzog’s stock in trade.

The result is about as fascinating and appalling as the ludicrous preamble suggested. In his documentaries and films Herzog puts extreme men in extreme settings and it’s the same story here as he parachutes Nicholas Cage into a post-Katrina New Orleans, leaving him to sink or swim. The title does the director no favours. Not only does the colon set the ominous tone for a brainless Michael Bay style thriller, more weirdly it also claims a relation that exists only in Herzog’s imagination. For although he took time out from fanning the Ferrara duel to claim it wasn’t a remake, having apparently not seen the original, it isn’t the “sequel” he suggested either. An unrepentant diversion that drains the source of the grit and religious guilt, this ouroboros of a film bites itself in the tail so that nothing remains of the neglected political coda but a puff of smoke from Cage’s crack pipe.

The content as far as it goes involves Cage’s investigation of the murder of a Senegalese family — but that flimsy alibi is soon submerged in favour of a druggy dérive through the unmoored landscape. In that interzone of lizard lounge psychosis and debowelled alligators, no one is more reptilian than Cage’s shagged out cop McDonough. One minute he is hooking up with dealers to get a fix, the next planting props to make the evidence speak. Lizard, Cage, lizard, Cage: who needs the machinations of the Kuleshov effect when Cage was never that convincingly human in the first place? Even the penguin in Encounters At The End of the World portrayed “existential crisis” more convincingly than he does here.

His baggy, elongated McDonagh (in every way a stretch from the original Harvey Keitel character) is instead all about smutty job satisfaction. “You just gotta love it,” he comments after a particularly stealthy backdoor apprehension, proving that you should never count your chickens. They might congratulate themselves on their hatching. All in all, though, his to-camera winks are fair enough: the non-stop girl and gun bender is hampered only by a limp acquired during the opening heroics and the pesky CCTV at headquarters that confounds open plunder from the evidence lockers. As for the football player who defies his financial speculations, that can be “arranged” — if not by the law then at least by fate, which makes a series of out-of-field interventions late in play. The real-life corruption that ran rampant in post-Katrina Orleans was obviously not quite real enough for the director, as all drama here comes thanks to a series of deus ex machinas that make a mockery of Keitel’s parallel gambling habit. Never mind Harvey, your antagonists will probably just like mellow eventually. Or is that just Cage’s Snake Eyes?

Before you accuse Herzog of selling out though, it’s worth considering that he’s probably so contrary as to have directly set out to rebut almost every point of rapture in Roger Ebert’s creepy 2007 love letter to him. Sex and chase scenes: 90 minutes’ worth. Entertaining violence: the leitmotif; see particularly the scene where Cage cuts off the oxygen supply to a geriatric while delightedly rounding “YOU are ALL THAT’S WRONG with society!” Romance: why else is Eva Mendes putting out like a sub J-Lo? As for the artificial endings you’d be hard pressed to find a more tritely circular conclusion than the smiling graduation to sergeant that puts paid to McDonough’s days as a Bad Lieutenant. If détournement was Herzog’s plan, it’s a shame he proved so deft a maestro of the vehicle; somewhere along the line the prey has erased its tracks and the predator is looking about, confused. Still, all is not lost. Had Herzog been on this kind of trip back in the Antarctic, even the stray penguin would have been rescued by the fortuitous passage of a Greenpeace convoy. And besides, why juggle semantics like “laughing at” and “laughing with” when laughter is the only possible reaction? False dichotomies start to seem a bit dour when Herzog is having this much fun.

Trash Humpers: The Title is Literal

Harmony Korine has dubbed his new trashcore romp a “found object” – something you might stumble across during a good bin rifle, although, after the film, you might have to sidestep perverts exploring their erotic potential. Regressing via the conventional Mister Lonely to the territory of Gummo’s hermetic misfits, it follows a crew of geriatric burn victims in Jackass-style seedy japes. Already likened to John Waters for its paean to trash, the lo-fi VHS (transfigured by 35mm) comes replete with playback commands and ‘80s platform game aesthetics.

The plot (or not) is a series of repetitive vignettes – plastic babies dragged about a suburban wasteland on makeshift leashes and every conceivable structure smashed with a hammer, cueing a danse macabre over the corpse. Punctuating the cast’s stream of conscious deliberations on the monstrous (like the funny lifestory of conjoined twins Eng and Chang) and touching musical odes to the lonely, there is the ever-present acuity of Korine’s wind-up cackle.

Much like Todd Browning’s Freaks updated for the confessional youtube generation, the weirdest thing remains the human “truth” within the beast. Despite the ethos of wilful crappiness (reaching a nadir in the band’s blatantly fake party-shop prosthetics), the film makes Jerry Springer’s suburbia look like the fake. The result is less monotonous than hypnotic—something sentimental in the evening gloves and half-recalled yoga postures of the be-wigged matriarch (Korine’s sister) and even the cheap communion of the eponymous trysts.