Bad lieutenant 2

When Nicholas Cage has a good script and director, he's able to be so outrageously over the top that he seems scarily normal. As the blackly comic title character in the reincarnation of Bad Lieutenant, Cage totters and rages and snorts under Werner Herzog's direction. Subtitled Port of Call: New Orleans, this is a detective thriller, police procedural and a black comedy that marks a high way-OTT point for both actor and director.

Maybe they should not make a sequel, but I hope they'll work together again and as well as they did for this update of the Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel cult favourite. This Bad Lieutenant will also become a B-class classic.

The meticulously bizarre screenplay from William Finkelstein, a veteran TV series writer (LA Law, Law & Order, Murder One), begins in a Katrina-flooded police station in New Orleans. Detective Terence McDonagh (Cage) checks it out with his partner (Val Kilmer), talks tough, finds drugs (which he keeps) and is in two minds about rescuing a trapped Latino suspect.

At the end of the movie, Cage has been promoted but he's still an addict appropriating drug finds, and he squats silently with the Latino beneath a giant aquarium tank. Both stare vacantly at the camera, then Cage gives a gruff laugh. Like much of the movie, it's perversely memorable.

Cage's cop is complexly amoral. He lies, steals, gambles, breaks all the rules, terrorises old ladies, solves crimes through stealth and cunning, and loves his drunken father and call-girl girlfriend (Eva Mendes). A painful back is his excuse for chasing drugs, and Cage makes the most of a role that calls on him to highlight a hunched shoulder and off-balance gait. He smooths his shock of hair, rubs his coked nose, bursts into moments of disjointed movement and words, and sees giant iguanas no one else does.

The camera notices a dying alligator that may, or may not, have caused an auto crash, and no one on the set notices him. Only the audience sees the alligator's presumed partner, observing, maybe grieving, at the side of the highway.

That mystery is left unsolved, but every major inter-connected strand in the bizarre plot is tied up neatly, with noir and witty twists that defy the laws of logic, decency, common sense and B-feature cop movies. Herzog paces the action both calmly and frenetically, and the whole supporting cast appear to be happily making the most of juicy cameo roles.

The plot's key detail is the gangland execution of a Senegalese family of five. Does the bad lieutenant's means of solving the crime justify his sly means? Not enough moviegoers were allowed to find out. This bravura Cage role, and welcome return of Herzog from a life of prolific documentary-making, only earned a limited release and US$1.5 million in the US. Distributors there don't think their customers will buy amorality. Or cinematic magic.