Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
 
Less a remake of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult classic than the tale of another crooked, junkie cop going spectacularly off the rails, with Nicolas Cage finally blessed with a suitable vehicle for his increasingly over-the-top acting shtick.
 
After an-on-the-job injury, Cage’s cop swiftly graduates from his prescription drugs for chronic back pain to snorting cocaine, sniffing heroin and smoking crack.

From there, it’s an easy descent into crime, stealing evidence, ripping off punters for their dope and screwing their girlfriends, then later making a deal with the same drug lord he’s been trying to put away for the massacre of a Senegalese family in order to pay off his gambling debts, as well his high-class hooker girlfriend Frankie’s (Eva Mendes) pissed-off pimp.
 
It’s all completely loopy and surprisingly entertaining, as Herzog eschews the Catholic guilt and Christ visions, and notoriously hard-edged, grubby tone of the original, for black humour, and absurd lunacy involving hallucinations of iguanas, and a dead man’s breakdancing soul.
 
Cage’s sleep-deprived, drug-addled performance is suitably energetic, all madcap facial ticks and coked-up psychosis, although his demented, self-destructive cop never plumbs the depths of depravity and menace that Keitel’s did, even if the scene in which he threatens two elderly woman, screaming “I should kill you both, you fucks!” while brandishing his gun at one and ripping the oxygen tube from the nose of the other, comes closest.

Next: The Informant!