The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Werner Herzog's tale of a mad rogue cop stays well within its comfort zone

by Sheila JohnstonFriday, 21 May 2010

Playing for laughs: Nicolas Cage interrogates a witness in Werner Herzog's 'The Bad Lieutenant'

Werner Herzog is your go-to guy if you want a film about extraordinary madness. The German director's legendary partnership with Klaus Kinski yielded such wild and wonderful monuments to insanity as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Theirs would be the natural team for this tale of a cop run amok, but, Kinski having departed to that great padded cell in the sky, Herzog hooks up instead with Nicolas Cage. The result is a slickly amusing, facetious study in dementia that declares its weirdness loud and proud without straying anywhere close to the edge of its comfort zone.

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