Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) review

After injuring his back in the whole Hurricane Katrina debacle, NOLA detective Nicolas Cage becomes addicted to drugs and rapidly loses his mind, becoming prone to wild outbursts and deranged behavior - meanwhile, there's a drug-related massacre that needs investigating, and some gambling debts to be paid off. Initial fears that this would be dangerously similar to Abel Ferrara's revered 1992 film with Harvey Keitel can be safely dismissed: for starters, the tone here is whimsical whereas the Ferrara/Keitel picture is about Catholic guilt and spiritual abandonment and is considerably darker. Cage's daft performance and the sporadic odd-touch by Herzog (the iguanas, the lucky crack pipe, the dreaming fish) are what drive this routine police procedural - Werner does retain Ferrara's episodic structuring, however, skipping from incident to incident - before concluding in the most sarcastic way possible (Ferrara allowed little room for salvation; Herzog understands that the corrupt are sometimes rewarded).