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Rating: What is Werner Herzog doing in Hollywood? The question is rather pertinent even if the German filmmaker is not new to international ventures. What is surprising, however, is the type of film he is involved in: a genuine Hollywood movie, with Nicholas Cage, the beautiful Eva Mendes, and the sluggish Val Kilmer.
The film is the 2009 remake of the splendid Abel Ferrara movie “Bad Lieutenant” with Harvey Keitel, but of it, except for traces of the plot, nothing remains. The squalor, anger, filth, and darkness of the original work give way to lighter, less desperate, and less grim situations. Undoubtedly, here we fly lower, the film does not bring up Man and his Religion, does not involve unsolvable dramas, does not investigate dimly lit gaps. Instead, there is a nice spotlight on the stage that lights everything up brightly.
Nic Cage is a very clever lieutenant addicted to using drugs of all kinds (dependent on various medications and painkillers), ready to use any means, especially illegal ones, to achieve his goals, sometimes good, sometimes less so. The post-hurricane New Orleans setting is not at all gloomy as one might imagine, and the protagonist moves through these beautiful sunny landscapes, among wooden houses, skyscrapers, and lush suburban neighborhoods as if he were out for a walk with his dog (which he does, moreover). The bad guys are stupid mobsters, gorilla-like and not even too sinister, accompanied by phantom bureaucrats trying to put a spoke in our hero's wheels, who, however, like the best “Arlechin, servant of two masters” flits about here and there untangling the not-so-complicated skein. The happy ending is the final blow to everything.
At this point, we return to the earlier question: what is Herzog doing in Hollywood? It’s not a good American-style police film and it’s not a Herzog film, that’s for sure. And to think that the premises were good: Ferrara’s film could lend itself to the hallucinated and extremely introspective cinematographic attitude of the German director, and Nicholas Cage could have been a wise choice, just remember his excellent performance in “Leaving Las Vegas”, while Mendes, who is supposed to be a drug-addicted prostitute, seems as if she just stepped out of the makeup room for a Vogue shoot. The plot is predictable and the knots unravel like shoelaces tied by a child for the first time, the characters are flat and stereotypical, the dialogues have an annoying tendency to be implausible, with unjustifiably comedic tones (and I think unintended) in a “Be Cool” style. The direction is still decent, I would say "professional" (I know for Herzog this is blasphemy, but here indeed…), and only a few scenes are worth keeping here and there where the director briefly regains his senses (or returns to his lucid madness), yet remaining light years away from his standards: the “interrogation” of the elderly lady is amusing, the scenes with reptiles and the dead man's soul dance (all in all not that bad) seem an attempt to enrich the film with something different, like an auteur signature. Failed operation.
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