A new poster for Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans” has debuted via ComingSoon. It looks… decidedly B-movie. Eww, for a Herzog movie this is the best they can do? Why don’t they just write, “coming straight to a DVD store near you.” Blech.
Anyhow, starring Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, the film centers on homicide detective Terrence McDonagh (Cage) who, during a heroic act of rescuing a prisoner from Hurricane Katrina, severely injures his back and is put on prescription pain medication. A year later, the lieutenant — struggling with his addictions to sex, Vicodin and cocaine — finds himself in the battle to bring down drug dealer Big Fate, who is suspected of massacring an entire family of African immigrants.
Co-starring the likes of Val Kilmer, Xzibit, Fairuza Bulk and Jennifer Coolidge, the film has apparently already premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival and will hit the Toronto Film Festival alongside Herzog’s “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done,” next week (‘Lieutenant’ is also screening at Telluride).
Perhaps tellingly (based off the mediocre poster), writing from Venice, Todd McCarthy from Variety described the film as “offbeat, silly, disarming and loopy all at the same time” predicting that “viewers will decide to ride with that or just give up on it, according to mood and disposition.” He also calls it, as you might have expected, “loony.”
McCarthy goes on to explain that while the picture “lacks sufficient action to sate the appetites of sensation seekers” and is “indifferently made, erratically acted and dramatically diffuse,” it still exhibits “a sort of deadpan zaniness, stemming from a steadfast conviction in its own absurdity, that gives [the film] a strange distinction all its own.” Smells like it’s either genuinely terrible, or contains the Herzog-ian charms that his devotees already adore. Honestly, we love Herzog, but with Cage and the already nutty-looking trailer, it could easily go either way. It’ll probably be up to subjective opinion, though $10,000 says this guy loves it no matter what, as he seems to have already decided in advance, as per usual.
Speaking with Reuters meanwhile, Cage discussed Herzog’s film while distancing it from Abel Ferrera’s Harvey Keitel-starrer “Bad Lieutenant” from which this film is somewhat borrowing from. “This is a New Orleans cop, it takes place in New Orleans, it’s ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,’ it’s not ‘Bad Lieutenant,’ ” the actor said trying to distinguish between the two pictures. “It would be unfair to compare the two movies. Harvey [Keitel]’s trajectory is really dealing with guilt and all of that, and perhaps fits more into that (Judeo-Christian) program, so to me it’s a completely different story and a different cop…[My character] is in a sense part of his environment, he’s trying to operate within an environment which has a drug culture and a street culture, so how do you survive in that world?”
‘Bad Lieutenant’ will reportedly hit theaters on November 30.