In Theaters: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Director Herzog, perhaps free now to shed the year or so of churlish coquetry on the subject of whether this film would be a sequel, remake, or homage to Abel Ferrara's 1992 predecessor of the same name, made a wise but difficult choice in relocating the scenario to New Orleans. How does one shoot a noir in a city without shadows? Herzog favors the baking, uninterrupted sunlight of the low-slung, literally washed out wards of the city over the French quarter and more lush, colonial strips. Even indoors, when for instance McDonagh is visiting his troublesome but sweet call girl girlfriend (Eva Mendes), the light is bright and flat, almost oppressively so. The shadows manifest themselves in other, more material ways: McDonagh keeps seeing iguanas -- ugly, awesome little beasts who turn up on a kitchen table during an interrogation and cock a haughty eye to the camera during one of the film's hinkiest scenes. Several of nature's people figure in a similar way: a pet fish in a bag, a heaving dog in a car, and a snake winding through the flood waters reenforce the film's sunburned cast of displacement, lost bearings. When, ultimately, a soul is displaced from its body, McDonagh looks on with glee as it proceeds to do some killer breakdancing in the middle of the room.

Loosely structured as a procedural (McDonagh is investigating the drug-related murder of a Senegalese family), Bad Lieutenant is more concerned with conjuring an atmosphere of existential decay and giddy foreboding than the moral investigation and glum anxiety of (forgive me, Werner) the original. As our conduit, Cage embodies the perversities of a crooked cop who's often as bad at being bad as he is at being good: McDonagh, introduced as a hero, descends into badge-flashing tyranny, an entitled, compulsive prick who's not even wrong. "This is a government of law, not men," are the words engraved on the New Orleans city hall, but Bad Lieutenant has a whole lot of fun suggesting otherwise. McDonagh may be nuts, but treating law and order (to say nothing of ethics) like a kind of personal pyramid scheme -- take some, swap some, give some, just keep that fucker rolling -- is hardly the purview of the insane, or even the merely bad. Some might say it's the American way.

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