5/10
Despite the shared title, this film has very little to do with the Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel movie from 1992, apart from the fact that in both cases the main character is a police lieutenant - oh yes, and he's bad.
In the New Orleans floods of 2005, policeman Nicolas Cage saves a prisoner from drowning in his cell, and is rewarded with a promotion and a bad back. So he's now a lieutenant with a drug problem (pain relief having blossomed into full on addiction). He has the obligatory beautiful hooker girlfriend (Eva Mendes), and mounting debts, caused by the amount of nose powder he's using. So although things are bad, they can only get worse.
The director of this wannabe OTT escapade is Werner Herzog, the legendary German director who has been around for several decades, having survived working with Klaus Kinski, the maddest actor on the planet. Cage is no Kinski, although he likes to think that he is, and this film, despite the reports suggesting that it's some kind of masterpiece, is not very special.
Faces get pulled, iguanas pop up for no good reason, and the plot lurches on from one implausible scenario to another. In the middle of it all, Cage does his well known, 'I'm madder than a cave full of eccentric bats' impersonation, pulling faces and making bug eyes. I'm a fan of Nic in films like Adaptation and Matchstick Men when his barminess is tied to some relevant character trait, but here it's more like an arbitrary add on, or maybe the only reason for the film's very existence. It's not a boring film, and some critics have salivated with delight, but I have to say I found myself underwhelmed.
