02/04/10 - The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009, 122 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1095217/

This film was one of those that seemed to get a lot of praise but ended up not getting any Oscar nominations. I decided to give it a look. I also checked out the trailer beforehand and it seemed like it had the potential to be a good mix of dark comedy and good drama.

The movie stars Nicholas Cage as Terence McDonagh as returns to the force after a spinal injury. Unfortunately the injury requires medication and soon McDonagh becomes addicted to the pain killers and his life begins to intertwine with the lives of the underworld criminals in New Orleans. Some of these are: a "girlfriend" prostitute Frankie Donnenfeld (Eva Mendes); big drug dealer Big Fate (Xzibit), and bookie Ned Schoenholtz (Brad Dourif).

The movie was mainly praised for Cage's performance. While I agree it was really really good, it was also extremely quirky. Sometimes Cage just went too over-the-top in his character. It was certainly hilarious to watch, that's for sure, but I can't say it ranked up there with the best performances of the year. As for the rest of the cast, they performed well in their roles (Xzibit surprised me by not being terrible, for one) but these were really limited. Cage is the focus of the entire movie, for good or bad. Mendes has the next most amount of screen time, but she doesn't do anything to impress beyond her limited role.

The bad thing about The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans is that it goes all or nothing in its focus on Cage's McDonagh. No other character is developed. The entire movie is about his descent into this drug-induced stage of his career and how it completely envelops everything around him. There's other things that could have been highlighted such as what happened with the other cop Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) following the spinal injury to McDonagh or how Donnenfield came to realize she had a drug problem. Instead, the movie throws these secondary characters around with little care and even less focus. All in all, it results in many subplots looking more like afterthoughts than any contribution to the story as a whole.

As for McDonagh's downward spiral, for the most part it's handled pretty well. I liked how his character became more and more engrossed in the underworld and less caring about his career problems. Some of the scenes with him and Big Fate were the best in the film. Also, the absolutely crazy drug scenes where McDonagh has hallucinations are great. Sure, I'll admit I don't feel that they add much of anything except humor, but I liked them. However, after it treats us to this great story, it suddenly and abruptly lets it go. We get McDonagh and the police busting in on Big Fate and McDonagh seems torn as to what to actually do and treat his former friend. This scene was important and it falls apart to nothing in my opinion. The inner turmoil just isn't visible for McDonagh here (this I feel is a script problem, not a Cage problem). And then not much later we get a conclusion to everything. Personally, I feel a depressing ending would have worked a lot better than the ending that was given. I felt somewhat gypped at the end there.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. Cage does a great job and the resulting cast fills in what really amounts to minor roles. Cage pretending to be coked out of his mind is hysterically funny no matter how many times I see it. I think I'll remember the "His soul is still dancing" and wicked laugh afterward for a while - it's that funny. But at the end, looking back on the film, I felt like it could have been a lot more than "just" a good film.