Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans 爆裂警官

Cage throws himself into the role of a man not so much battling as fervidly dancing with his demons, allowing him to indulge in his most manic, unhinged mannerisms. Like a jumpy, coke-fueled Pied Piper, Cage takes viewers to the very precipice of depraved self-abasement, while preserving just enough self-conscious humor to keep from tumbling in.

In a season featuring an exceptional number of films about characters going rogue — from “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Antichrist” to the upcoming movies “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “The Road” — “Bad Lieutenant” might be the most true to its own anarchic, subversive impulses.

Director, Werner Herzog, a filmmaker never known for half measures, has taken the basic character, plot points and leitmotifs from Abel Ferrara's 1992 “Bad Lieutenant,” and given them more heat, humor and stylized action.

His most provocative decision — aside from, at least symbolically, resurrecting a character created and killed off by Ferrara and actor Harvey Keitel in the original film — was to move the story from New York to post-Katrina New Orleans. That turns out to have been a perceptive and aesthetically fruitful move, giving Herzog exactly the right atmosphere to explore his cardinal themes of man's inhumanity to man and the indiscriminate brutality of nature, in a city stripped to its swampy, morally murky essence.

Moonlight and magnolias are thereby banished in Herzog's film, which instead presents a city still scarred and reeling from the deluge, a city not of beignets and Sazeracs but of featureless casinos, banal sports bars and the pervasive stench of rot from within.

The New Orleans where Cage's Lt. Terence McDonagh investigates a homicide (scooping up generous helpings of controlled substances along the way) is a Wild West frontier of generalized squalor, where everyone is either jacked up or numbed out, including Terence's hooker girlfriend, played by the sensational Eva Mendes in a turn that recalls Ava Gardner in her earthy sexuality and innate warmth.

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