The torments of the damned have become the discomforts of the irretrievably compromised in Werner Herzog's jittery black-comic remake of the cult 1992 shocker by Abel Ferrara, which starred Harvey Keitel as the messed-up junkie cop investigating the rape of a nun. By jettisoning much of the original's premise and crazed punk theology, and by crucially declining to take seriously Ferrara's characteristic obsession with evil, Herzog has created something very different yet very interesting: a funky satirical noir, now set in New Orleans just after the Katrina disaster.
Where every frame of the original was soaked in that despairing brimstone which Ferrara sweats all over his films, the Herzog signature only emerges some way into this film, in one extraordinary tableau of surreal horror, which kicks the film up into a higher order of imagination. Traffic cops have been called to attend a freeway disaster with plenty of fatalities: an SUV lies upside down on the tarmac, its undulating rubber tyre-trails snaking back to the dying body of an alligator which somehow got on to the road, one forepaw still paddling the air in its death agony. The movie suddenly changes from celluloid to video, and we switch to the POV of a second alligator, who watches unnoticed from the roadside scrub, as the notoriously corrupt and drug-addicted Lieutenant Terence McDonagh shows up, played by Nicolas Cage with gleeful relish, trying to wheedle his colleagues into cancelling a speeding ticket for his bookie's niece – a favour he hopes will extend his credit-line.
This is where the authentic voice of Herzog breaks through. For most of the rest of the time, the movie's voice is that of Cage, who carries off this bizarre odyssey with a persistent crazed style, his suit laid on his pain-wracked shoulders as if on a wire coathanger, and I can't imagine any other actor getting away with the sudden shouts and horrified laughs, like bursts of automatic gunfire.
Desperately looking for some good-news PR after the Katrina disaster, the city's police department have seized on the case of McDonagh, who against all his corrupt and cynical instincts had dived into the rising floodwater in the basement police cells to rescue a prisoner. He is promoted to lieutenant, but his heroic escapade appears to have exacerbated his chronic back-pain, for which he is prescribed Vicodin, a respectable but ferociously addictive medication that accelerates the lieutenant's consumption of cocaine, crack and heroin.
As the film progresses, the lieutenant's functioning level gradually descends from High to Medium-to-Low, as he pursues a mass-slaughter case with increasing obsession: the slaying of a group of Senegalese drug dealers. Compared with Keitel's nun in the original, these victims do not have any obvious tragic status, but nonetheless it is a case that has galvanised McDonagh, who appears at first to be playing by the book, even reproving his equally notorious colleague Stevie (Val Kilmer) for being too rough with a street snitch.
But McDonagh has other worries. He has co-dependency issues with his high-class escort girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes), another coke enthusiast, who winds up having to look after the labrador belonging to McDonagh's dad, who is going off to AA and rehab. And all the time, McDonagh's disorders lead him into increasingly sinister compulsions and hallucinations, and the rising floodtide of addiction and corruption threatens to engulf him utterly. Or does it? Is something else going on here? Have we entirely misread the implications of that original, fateful dive into the murky depths of the station house basement?
As if in an unwholesome soap opera, McDonagh ranges freely about the city, and Herzog allows his movie a good deal of digressive, episodic rein. He has a thoroughly bizarre, tongue-in-cheek scene in which McDonagh takes Frankie to his father's handsome house, somewhere in the middle of the swamp, and shows her the dark and manky shed which he said was his private magical place as a child, where he would fantasise about buried treasure. Nicolas Cage's great equine face, lit up with delusional elegaic joy, is a deadpan comic touch, although there is nothing deadpan about the moment in which Cage removes the oxygen nose-tube of an old lady in a care home, and refuses to put it back until she tells him what he wants to know. Jack Bauer, eat your heart out.
It's a critical commonplace to describe a movie or book as such-and-such "on crack" – superfluous in this case, because Nicolas Cage's character and so many others are literally on crack, always hunched over the pipe and huffing it up. It is truer to say that Herzog's movie is like Abel Ferrara off crack: dark and gruesome of course, but with something essentially more lenient than Ferrara – less self-torturing, more farcical and crucially more ironic, a quality not very apparent in the deadly serious horror of Ferrara's film-making. The US release explicitly adds the definite article to the title. Well, for me, Ferrara and Keitel will always be the bad lieutenant, but Werner Herzog is probably the only director qualified to take this on, and his bizarre reboot has a fascination all of its own.
