Nicolas Cage hamming it up as a perpetually stoned police lieutenant acting very badly couldn’t be more in different in tone than Abel Ferrara’s 1992 thriller of the same name. While Ferrara’s NC-17 tale was an unforgiving exercise in disparity, soaked in blood, heroin and catholic guilt. Here Herzog’s ‘loose reimagining’ has a massive streak of jet black comedy running through it as Cage, shags, snorts and shoots through 122 minutes of celluloid. The result is one of the best films of the year – in part due to a mesmerising turn from its lead actor.
Whilst betting on whether a lone prisoner will drown in his cell in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Terence (Cage) has a last-minute change of heart and mounts a rescue. It’s an attempt at a good deed that ends in misfortune for our anti-hero, who after sustaining a spinal injury as a result, finds himself sliding into an extreme bout of chemical dependency to cope with the pain.
As the constantly high Terence runs wild through the streets of New Orleans in his quest for ever-increasing narcotics-fuelled depravity, the delicate equilibrium between his personal and work life threatens to implode when a Senegalese family are brutally shot down in their own home. Touched by a rare moment of compassion in his drug-riddled state, Terence begins a dangerous quest to bring prime suspect ‘Big Fate’ (Xzibit) to justice, with his equally-stoned prostitute girlfriend (Mendez), newly-sober father (Bower) and alcohol-soaked stepmother (Coolidge) in tow.
Director Werner Herzog is known for his ability to push his leading men to extremes (German actor Klaus Kinski famously pulled a gun on Herzog on the set of Aguirre, Wrath Of God). Here he gets the best performance out of Cage since winning an Oscar for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas. It’s an astonishing performance that, despite it’s subject matter, is played entirely for laughs. Whilst permanently looking for his next fix, hunched over in pain and occasionally very angry, Cage finds the desperate humanity at the core of his sociopathic, drug-addled state. Whilst on paper there’s not a lot to laugh about in Cage violently threatening the elderly, assaulting couples and consuming never ending amounts of illegal contraband, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more wickedly amusing film this year.
PONO is not for the easily offended and it’s more than likely to be shrouded in controversy upon release. It’s a rare combination of a renowned auteur meeting his match in a wildly eccentric actor and resulting in (whether intentional or not) filmmaking that’s exciting, dangerous and much like it’s leading man – out of control. PONO is a true rarity in film where you genuinely never know what’s going to happen next, ideas exit as soon as they enter and the entire film takes off in tangents for no good reason – yet it’s held together by a perverse logic which only an experienced film-maker could get away with. One of the best films of the year and an immediate cult classic, Bad Lieutenant: Port Of New Orleans is edgy, dark and extraordinarily entertaining.
Jonny Dawson
