Nearly but not quite a remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant of 1992, at the very least a relocation of it from the Big Apple to the Big Easy, perhaps simply a variation on a theme — all the same kinds of badness, drugs, gambling, prostitutes, a blind eye to crime under his nose — but hardly a viable franchise, a continuing series, even assuming there’s no shortage of bad lieutenants around the country. (Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: Duluth.) If the film doesn’t match the hellish hyperbole of its namesake, that’s not at all a bad thing, a kind of badness that we don’t want matched. And yet, not so good if not all the way to downright bad, the German director Werner Herzog now seems more fully assimilated into Hollywood than in his previous commercial venture, Rescue Dawn, more fully erased as a nutball personality, despite some genuinely odd reptile footage: a twitching road-killed alligator and an interested alligator onlooker into whose skin or eyeball the camera earnestly tries to crawl, and later, equally close-up, a couple of hallucinatory iguanas. Not remotely competent as a well-knit policier, and with a final stretch that feels like an extended dream scene from which we keep expecting to wake up, the film holds our interest, scene by scene, through its vivid characters acted with an edge. Nicolas Cage, who more than once goes over the top in his psychosis, at all times does painfully well at miming the symptoms of a bad back (tilted shoulders, bent body, a forward lean as if withstanding a gale-force tailwind), the best kind of badness in the film. Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif, Fairuza Balk, Xzibit. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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