You can blame the producers for the clunky title, but there's much to thank them for too. Thirty-something Chicago-born siblings Alan and Gabe Polsky were looking to switch from investment banking to the movie business, and met up with experienced Hollywood exec Edward R. Pressman. The 67-year-old has helped bring some quality films to the screen - Wall Street, The Crow, American Psycho, Thank You For Smoking - and some awful ones too (such as Judge Dredd and Street Fighter). Among his oeuvre was the outlandish but acclaimed Bad Lieutenant (1992), directed by Abel Ferrara, which starred Harvey Keitel as a corrupt drug-addled gambling New York cop who finds redemption in police work.
Pressman had the rights to any follow-up, and asked the Polskys if they wanted to come on board for their first feature as producers. After watching the original for the first time, the answer from both brothers was a resounding yes. They hired former LA Law writer William Finkelstein to pen a more 'commercially favourable' screenplay than the original (in which there were several visually shocking moments) and then went after a new director and star. Ambitiously, the brothers approached 'the maverick from Munich' Werner Herzog - a director whose previous work (Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) suggests such a project wouldn't have been up his street. But Herzog saw potential - a fascinating central character that would be perfect for Nicolas Cage, with whom he had long wanted to work, and plenty of scope to tinker with Finkelstein's screenplay.
The finished film shows the Polskys were right to seek Herzog's experimental eye, which has considerably livened up what would otherwise have been a fairly formulaic police procedural. Straight off the bat, Herzog agreed to a request from Cage to move the setting from New York to New Orleans. The action takes place post-Katrina, but the hurricane is rarely referred to beyond a flooded jail cell opening that shows Cage's Terence McDonagh to be a man of mixed morals, taunting a prisoner who's in up to his neck and then deciding to save him after all - a decision that wins him a promotion from Slightly Dodgy Sergeant to the titular Bad Lieutenant.
Thereafter, McDonagh can't stay off the hard drugs, can't stay away from his prostitute girlfriend (a fellow junkie), can't stop gambling on Louisiana's college football team (even though they keep losing)... he's addicted to everything that's bad for him. The brutal murder of an immigrant Senegalese family gives him something else to get his snarling teeth stuck into, and the identity of the culprits - an angry drug dealer called Big Fate and his henchmen - soon becomes clear. As his authority and rationality slowly unravels, McDonagh grasps frantically at the threads in a bid to keep his world together...
Herzog throws his own oddities into the cocktail. Visible boom microphones bounce into the top of scenes of dialogue, an occurrence so obvious and amateurish it must be deliberate. An alligator watches from the side of the road as his companion lies seriously injured following a road traffic accident, accompanied by some jaunty jazz music. During a surveillance, McDonagh's dependency and sleep deprivation results in a hallucination - two iguanas appear, all sleek dewlaps and long necks, their heads bobbing up and down. The cops behind them stand stock still while Cage, resembling the reptiles, watches his vision warily. Later, when Terence is at his most deranged after a shootout involving Big Fate, an even stranger yet funnier image presents itself. In addition, there's quirky casting (eg comic actress Jennifer Coolidge aka 'Stifler's Mom' playing it straight as McDonagh's depressed drunken stepmom Genevieve, and Oscar-nominated Michael Shannon as low-level property room cop Mundt) and the addition of some unexplained symbols (such as a fish in a glass, and a silver spoon) that don't have any obvious meanings at first but can be interpreted differently after the credits roll.
Herzog was keen to drop the words 'Bad Lieutenant' from the release title; but the Polskys wanted to retain it, in the hope of ultimately building a successful franchise of crazed cops, with a different director, star and location each time. Pressman is reportedly not so keen, but it's an interesting premise and if the framework is loose enough for a director like Herzog to work so well within, I'd love to see the results. But the magic ingredient in this particular concoction has to be Cage - an actor much maligned when chasing paychecks in mainstream fare, but worthy of praise when willing to go loco in indieland.
Memorable Line: Terence McDonagh (manically): I'll kill all of you! To the break of dawn! To the break of dawn, baby!
I Know That Face: So many! Here's two... McDonagh's bookie Ned Schoenholtz may be better known to most as the evil Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings trilogy; and Irma P. Hall (playing the grandmother of a witness to the murders) was Marva Munson in the Coen Brothers version of The Ladykillers.
Location, Location, Location: Audubon Nature Institute - Aquarium of the Americas, New Orleans.
1 comments:
I loved it. Surely the role Cage, too frequently cashing those cheques for such a talented actor, was born to play.
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