Sometimes you're in the mood to watch a movie that makes you laugh. Sometimes you're in the mood to watch a movie that makes you cry. Sometimes you're in the mood to watch a movie that makes you think. Are you ever in the mood to watch a movie that makes you say, "WTF?!"
No? Me neither.
But, for the purposes of this review let's pretend that you are. Well then, I highly reccomend "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans". Directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nicholas Cage, "TBL : POC - NO" is about a corrupt cop working in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Lieutenant McDonagh (Cage) fights to rid the world of drug dealers, prostitutes and gangsters when he isn't doing drugs, visiting prostitutes and making deals with his bookie. Actually, that's not true, he can multitask. Going to question a witness? Close the door and smoke some dope. Caught a couple doing drugs? Let them off with a warning and take their stash.
Cage is attempting to solve a quintuple homicide case, keep his prostitute girlfriend safe and pay his bookie (and the mob) before something unfortunate happens to him. All the while, he's deteriorates in front of us, devolving into the Edgar the "sugar water" alien from "Men in Black". Sometimes he sees imaginary iguanas and can't stop staring. Are they imaginary? The Val Kilmer character said it wasn't real, but was that a joke? I know the dead alligator was real but what's the long out of focus shot of the living alligator all about? I'm pretty sure the snake was really there.
Is this a taught crime drama? Is it humanist tragedy of contradiction? Is it a clever satire of society's corruption? Maybe it's a parody of corrupt cop movies. Maybe it's farce. It's probably a farce. Watching the movie, one doesn't know what to think. Having watched the movie, I guess it's safe to apply the catchall term "dark comedy".
This is the kind of movie that people who are more intellectual than I will hale as brilliant cinema. Probably everything is symbolic, everything weird is to provoke a reaction and everything that seems stupid was done on purpose to be stupid. This is also the kind of movie that morons berate because it doesn't make sense as a straight-ahead, formulaic thriller. While I think the former are more right than the latter, this movie isn't my type of entertainment. And it's a "must see" if you want to see something confounding and ambiguous with shades of silliness mixed in. Or is it?
Rating 5/10 - Ambivalent.
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