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The Big Queasy

Dark, druggy, funny ‘Bad Lieutenant’ is one of Nicolas Cage’s best acting jobs

Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), right, and Frankie (Eva Mendes) in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans." (AP Photo/First Look Studios,Lena Herzog)
Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), right, and Frankie (Eva Mendes) in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans." (AP Photo/First Look Studios,Lena Herzog)Read more

In Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World," there's a sequence that contains perhaps the essential Herzog image.

As Antarctic penguins commence their migratory march, one breaks from the pack and toddles off in his own, possibly suicidal direction, and no amount of coaxing can convince him to join the rest of his species.

You can find the equivalent of that solitary, obstinate, adventurous penguin in many of Herzog's best movies, and he's not hard to spot in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans." (FYI: This movie has nothing to do with the Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel original).

He's Lt. Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), a homicide detective who unravels when an act of heroism results in a back injury, painkiller dependency, a growing array of destructive addictions, then a complete moral and physical collapse.

All this occurs as McDonagh investigates an awful murder — an entire family of Senegalese immigrants is executed in their 9th-ward home.

It's a disaster in the midst of a disaster — neighboring homes still bear the spray-painted imprints of rescue workers who inspected properties after the Katrina catastrophe.

McDonagh, then, becomes a stand-in for government abdication. He does not protect, he does not serve, and he spends most of his time rousting citizens for money and crack cocaine — enough for himself and his hooker girlfriend (Eva Mendes).

"Port of Call New Orleans," though, is not a finger-wagging, moralizing downer. Far from it. Herzog pushes Cage into manic mode, and the movie edges toward black, demented comedy as McDonagh seeks to balance the demands of the investigation with his own gambling and drug addictions.

This tone is intentional and woven into the script, which has McDonagh, in one instance, dog-sitting his father's mutt as he "protects" the only witness to the shooting, a terrified teenager who quickly realizes that the detective is a junkie. In another scene, McDonagh strong-arms an elderly woman in a rest home, pulling her oxygen tube from her nose until she talks.

Cage can be loopy, weird and at the same time sympathetic — crucial to our response to this character — and Herzog draws one of his better performances here.

The actors are consistently good — Mendes, Jennifer Coolidge, Alvin Joiner, Brad Dourif, Shea Whigham — and everyone has the strange spirit of the piece.

It's left to Herzog and scripter William Finkelstein to keep the movie from drifting into snarky nihilism — Herzog is rumored to have concocted the ending himself, and it's an unexpected blend of narrative ingenuity and decency. *

Prodcued by Edward Pressman, Randall Emmett, John Thompson, Nicolas Cage, Stephen Belafonte, Alan Polsky and Gabe Polsky, directed by Werner Herzog, written by William Finkelstein, music by Mark Isham, distributed by First Look Pictures.