Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, Blu-ray (2009/2010)
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif
Studio: First Look Studios FLP-12966 [4/6/10]
Video: 1.85 for 16:9 widescreen color, 1080p HD
Audio: English Dolby True HD 5.1, 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
Extras: The Making of Bad Lieutenant, Bad Lieutenant digital photography book, Theatrical trailer, Alternate trailer, Previews
Length: 122 minutes
Rating: *****
Should admit first off that Herzog is one of my favorite directors, and although I haven’t liked anything Nicolas Cage has done before, he turns in a very believable and fantastic performance under Herzog’s direction; he seems made for the role. Turns out this is a remake of the same basic story shot in New York City by Abel Ferrara in 1992 and starring Harvey Keitel. (While I haven’t seen it, others feel the remake is much more entertaining.) Taking place in New Orleans following Katrina, Herzog benefited from a realistic decayed and rubble-strewn environment without having to spend a lot on production.
Cage is a rogue detective of great skill who is devoted to his job but also to scoring as many drugs as he can lay his hands on by bending the law. His excuse is a serious back problem for which he is prescribed vicodin. Of course that does almost nothing for him, so he moves up the road thru coke, oxycondin, crack and heroin. His girlfriend is a prostitute, his father and sister alcoholics. He is doggedly working on a case of an illegally-immigrated Sengalese family who have been brutally massacred by dope dealers, and nothing is going to stop him for ferreting out the killers, including making deals with other dope dealers to get more dope for himself.
While Herzog doesn’t have here as extreme a location as for most of his films, he adds unique off-the-wall threatening touches with objective reptile-eye views of some scenes. In one an alligator is slinking on his way to eat up some cops who have arrived at the scene of a highway accident where someone ran over another alligator. In another closeups of two iguanas fill the screen with Cage observing them from the background. A doo wop tune on the soundtrack makes it look almost like a music video with the iguanas singing. Another weird Herzog touch is the supposed soul of a gangster break-dancing over his just-shot body.
The plot thickens later in the film as the Lieutenant needs lots of money in a hurry to pay off gambling debts and mobsters who are leaning on him, due to his having roughed up a john who had just roughed his prostitute girlfriend. And he still hasn’t solved the massacre because he let the only witness – a 15-year-old boy – out of his sight for a few minutes in order to snort some coke. The Lieutenant seems to be well on his way to hell, but one of more implausible things about the film is that it actually has a sort of happy ending, would you believe?
The Making Of documentary is interesting and the Blu-ray transfer is excellent. If your screen displays every last inch of the 1.85 image, you may notice a few mike booms carelessly coming into the frame; my Samsung supposedly only has about 2% overscan but I only saw one.
— John Sunier
