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

Indeed, it's a measure of Cage's fearlessness and charisma that, even at his most dissipated, Terence holds the viewers' sympathy, and maybe even their bent admiration. This is because “Bad Lieutenant” (written by William Finkelstein) is shot through with humor black as a Louisiana bayou, an obliquely wicked comic sensibility that was largely missing from the first movie.

There are undeniable, if perverse, laughs to be found in Terence's recapitulation of the all-American family, when at one point he drives around with cracked approximations of the classic wife, kid and dog. The same can be said for a scene in which Terence talks real estate with a local drug kingpin (hip-hop artist and MTV host Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner) while the criminal's henchmen casually dumps a dead body into a canal in the background.

The sick kicks of “Bad Lieutenant” certainly aren't for everybody. Nor are Herzog's periodic forays into thickly troweled symbolism, such as shooting scenes with an alligator or two unblinking iguanas in the foreground, as if to underline, italicize and boldface the primal urges that tempt his protagonist. (This is, after all, the director who intoned with Teutonic despair in his documentary “Grizzly Man” that when he looked in the face of a grizzly bear “I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”)

Admittedly, there's no excuse for a filmmaker of Herzog's experience to allow as many visible boom microphones as there are here. Still, he has a sensualist's eye for down and dirty pleasures, which are to be had in abundance in this improbably entertaining portrait of compulsion at its most reptilian. For filmgoers whose tastes run to pulp genre frissons, auteurist brio and Nicolas Cage at his most luridly over-the-top, "Bad Lieutenant" scores a kind of freaky-deaky home run.

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