The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

A move to the mainstream from the director and a fantastic performance from Nicolas Cage make this an impressive film.

In an age of endless remakes it is easy to assume that every new film bearing a familiar title is a cynical re-treading of an existing story. But while this film is technically a remake of Abel Ferrara's seedy 1992 movie, Bad Lieutenant, which featured Harvey Keitel as a depraved New York cop, it feels like the definitive take on the story.

The first sign that this movie would be more than a typical shallow remake was when the director Werner Herzog's name was attached to it. To some, Herzog is a veteran of the German new wave, who splits his time between affecting documentaries (Grizzly Man) and technically ambitious dramas (Fitzcarraldo). To others, he is one of the last maverick filmmakers, who routinely endangers his own life and those of his cast and crew to create cinema that bristles with the danger and chaos of the natural world.

Add into the mix Nicolas Cage, an actor who is often accused of overcooking performances, but can always be relied upon to deliver characters which redefine the boundaries of sanity. It's a trick he pulls off so effectively here that it would silence even his biggest critic. This film departs from Ferrara's original by trading its brutal redemption story for the blackest of black comedy. It begins in the days directly after Hurricane Katrina, where Terence McDonagh (Cage) and his partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) are shown taunting a prisoner who is trapped in a flooded jail cell, with the water level continuing to rise. McDonagh jumps into the water to save the man, but seriously injures himself in the process. We then see him weeks later, learning from a doctor that he is likely to suffer back pain for the rest of his life.

Before long, the medication he is prescribed becomes ineffective and the lieutenant begins stealing drugs from his police department's evidence room. The ailment turns an already crooked cop into a violent, hedonistic, barely lucid threat to society: everything a policeman shouldn't be. Just when McDonagh is hitting rock bottom, he somehow receives one of the biggest cases of his career. He must find the people responsible for the execution-style murders of an entire family of Senegalese immigrants.

The film has some truly shocking moments. In one scene, Cage's character is questioning two old women in a nursing home. When they become uncooperative he cuts off the oxygen supply to one of them and points his ever-present firearm at the other's face. But the actor is so hilarious as the demented, hunched and always wired lieutenant that the reality of his actions becomes far more bearable. Herzog's personality is usually at the forefront of his films, but here the director takes more of a back-seat, with only brief glimpses of strangely placed reptiles to remind you who's in charge. The movie is stunningly effective as a drama and as a vehicle for both Herzog and Cage. It combines the actor's most out-there work for a decade with Herzog's most mainstream, creating something that is memorable, disturbing and hilarious.