'Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans'

'Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans' (R) ***1/2

Writer: William Finkelstein
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner, Jennifer Coolidge, Tom Bower, Brad Dourif, Fairuza Balk

What a week for two of our veteran actors and stars! First Sandra Bullock gives the best performance of her career in "The Blind Side" and now Nicolas Cage is back in a big way with the old Cage in one of his best performances of his career in "Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans". This movie is a lot of fun to watch and it contains a crazy, wild but never over the top performance by Nicolas Cage like the old days before Hollywood neutered him. This noir type, gritty and outrageous crime movie directed by the great Werner Herzog captures it's setting flawlessly. It is set in New Orleans after the aftermath of Katrina and that destruction by Katrina becomes a third character in this movie making it rich in nuance adding to the greatness of this movie. The movie is sort of a retelling of the 1992 Harvey Keitel movie "Bad Lieutenant" where Keitel was a masochistic cop who used drugs and abused his power as a cop to have sex with his subjects. In this movie Cage plays the same kind of cop who after an accident is hunched over and becomes addicted to drugs as he uses his power to secure more drugs and taints evidence concerning a murder of a family during a drug deal. I like this movie better for it is just as wild, dirty and crazy but is more fun as the first one was hard to love mainly for it's rape of a nun and it just made me uncomfortable. I just had a big goofy smile on my face for Cage's bravura, nutso performance and for the absurd situations he gets himself into. This movie is funnier than 95% of the comedies out there and is one of the most enteartaining movies of the year. I think Herzog is the ideal director to make this work. Herzog has never made a bad movie and his capturing of New Orleans is perfect and adds to the color of the movie. Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes and Jennifer Coolidge are great in support. It all comes down to Nicolas Cage who is magnificent in this and it is a great compliment to him that I couldn't imagine another actor in this role. He jumps off the screen and gives a performance that should be awarded an Oscar nomination but never does because the Academy never seems to embrace brave performances like this one. This is a big surprise of a movie that is one of the best times I have had at a movie this year.