- Studio: First Look Pictures
- Release Date: Nov 20, 2009
- Critic Score
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100No one is better at this kind of performance than Nicolas Cage. He's a fearless actor. He doesn't care if you think he goes over the top. If a film calls for it, he will crawl to the top hand over hand with bleeding fingernails.
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100An exhilarating riff on the cop-thriller drama by a director at the top of his game -- Herzog is also at his most accessible here -- powered by an incendiary performance from Nicolas Cage. A very bad lieutenant, then. And a bloody good film.
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91Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.
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91The marvel of Cage's performance is that, somehow, it's all of a piece. That's the marvel of the movie, too. This is one fever dream you'll remember whole.
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90It's tempting to forget that Cage is not Terence. That would be unfair though, and diminish the sheer ferocity of his performance.
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90Mr. Herzog's film is a pulpy, glorious mess. Its maniacal unpredictability is such a blast that it reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.
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88A true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year.
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88Frankly, the story isn't remotely as interesting as Cage. Nothing is. In Ferrara's movie, Keitel emptied himself out. But there's a hellion's joy in Cage's cop.
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83It's not always easy to sort out the legitimately inspired touches from the merely campy ones, but the film has a deranged, go-for-broke spirit that makes such distinctions irrelevant.
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80Nicolas Cage is a joy to watch, and Werner Herzog is a brilliant storyteller.
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80Less like a movie than an interpretive-dance piece, with Cage as its lurching, depressed-satyr star.
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80The sparkle is what's been missing in the star's (Cage) recent performances. What's not to love in a movie that transmutes Terence's moral squalor, and the squalid state of post-Katrina New Orleans, into darkly comic gold?
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80Herzog deserves the lion's share of the credit for the movie's quality, but Port of Call New Orleans is also a comeback for Cage.
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75A one-of-a-kind experience that boasts a twice-in-a-lifetime performance from Nicolas Cage. The actor has not gone this deep into the abyss since "Vampire's Kiss" (1989).
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75It's that constant weirdness, coupled with Nicolas Cage's best performance in pretty much forever, that makes this depraved, sexually charged, over-the-top drama so much fun to watch.
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75It's a maniacal performance, complete with mad gales of laughter and insane bouts of temper. Cage doesn't go over the top, but he teeters darn close.
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75For filmgoers whose tastes run to pulp genre frissons, auteurist brio and Nicolas Cage at his most luridly over-the-top, Bad Lieutenant scores a kind of freaky-deaky home run.
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75Surprisingly funny yarn about a drug-addled cop in the Big Easy.
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75The result is a deliriously watchable and darkly comic portrait of a high-velocity death spiral.
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70There is a lot of very black humor; and it develops, somewhat surprisingly, into something suggesting a kind of cheerful pessimism.
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70This movie is a freaky little swamp thing.
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67This is the best performance Cage has delivered in ages, and Herzog demonstrates, once again, that he is capable of virtually anything.
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63Any resemblance between this Bad Lieutenant and the 1992 Abel Ferrara landmark is purely in the head of the dude who thought up the title.
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63There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.
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63Comparisons to the original Bad Lieutenant are unnecessary; Port of Call New Orleans can stand - and fall - on its own merits, inconsistent though they may be.
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60Cage is not quite Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo in the Big Easy. But his performance hits all the right mythopoetic beats, rising above the thin script and late-night-cable aesthetic.
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50Those expecting a return to the depravity and menace of Abel Ferrara's 1992 notorious original will be disappointed.
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50If there's a sure thing in movies, it's that if you cast Nicolas Cage in a role in which he goes crazy, he'll rise to the occasion and keep on rising until he seems even loonier than his character.
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50Instead of plumbing the depths of spiritual degradation, Herzog's movie is--largely due to Cage's performance--almost fun.
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50The film is offbeat, silly, disarming and loopy all at the same time, and viewers will decide to ride with that or just give up on it, according to mood and disposition.
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50The movie is a mess, but it's certainly not dull.
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20The film is an exasperating bore.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 30
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Mixed: 2 out of 30
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Negative: 8 out of 30
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