Criminally Underrated: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I wrote about the weakest (but still delightful) Neveldine/Taylor feature to date, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance for Spectrum Culture's Criminally Underrated series. After vastly overrating The Dark Knight Rises last year and even cooling on my more muted enjoyment of The Avengers, Ghost Rider 2 feels like the best of last year's crop of comic book films (close second: Dredd), and its ingenuity impresses me where the increasing severity of the tentpole super flicks is becoming more facile and stylistically dull.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Neveldine/Taylor, 2012)

After the gross incompetence of Marvel's first cinematic crack at one of its intriguing lesser-tier characters, I can't imagine anyone was altogether excited for a sequel to 2007's Ghost Rider. The fact that a sequel has come five years after the fact only compounds the general indifference that surely greeted this project. Nevertheless, Marvel outdid themselves in selecting Neveldine/Taylor to replace über-hack Mark Steven Johnson at the helm. The duo behind the frenzied, magnificently obscene Crank films could bring a refreshingly seedy and gonzo approach to this grindhouse-friendly comic book hero, and suddenly the hysterical miscasting of Nicolas Cage in the first movie became a boon. The thought of the craziest filmmakers in America working with the craziest actor in America seemed too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it is. If Marvel was willing to give this franchise another go, they clearly weren't going to invest much in it, and the result is a film that, in many ways, looks less professional and polished than the works Neveldine/Taylor did as underground filmmakers. Given barely any more money than they received for the excellent, criminally underrated Gamer and expected to make a more CGI-intensive film, Neveldine/Taylor must retreat to Romania to shoot, something they themselves mock with a location card vaguely reading "Eastern Europe."

Capsule Reviews: Trespass, My Week With Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Trespass (Joel Schumacher, 2011)

Having premiered at TIFF in September and come to DVD not two months later, Trespass couldn't possibly have been any good, but its badness is still striking. Shot with colors so artlessly exaggerated it looks merely as if someone adjusted the color balance rather than composed anything, Trespass wouldn't be interesting if it were lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki. A bog-standard house thriller with a simperingly moralistic message about family, the film proceeds with hilariously random flashbacks, endless narrative diversions, and hopelessly absurd dialogue. Nicole Kidman still can't get her emotions to match her starched facial expressions, while Nic Cage plays the fast-talking diamond dealer with his usual incoherent yelling. (I confess that his agonized cry of "You shit fucking animals!" is something of a highlight.) The film does improve (by which I mean becomes even worse) when someone socks Cage in the mouth and he speaks with a thick voice the rest of the film. But not even the delight of Cage at his worst can make up from Schumacher's clumsily overactive direction or the constant addition of conflicts thanks to useless reveals.

Brian De Palma: Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes is, in a bizarre way, the logical continuation of Brian De Palma's previous film, Mission Impossible. Mixing political thriller with questionable plays for De Palma's capacity to capture Romantic grief, Snake Eyes likewise feels like a safe bet for the director, but one he that allows him to push his luck. If it's one of the emptiest films of De Palma's corpus—a collection of work that houses more than a few technical exercises—at least the director gives us a story so ridiculous you almost don't mind when it collapses in the third act.

In a long career of intricate, arresting openings, the start of De Palma's Snake Eyes may be his finest. A 13-minute tracking shot that moves through the grimy politics behind a heavyweight championship fight, the opening moves from camera monitors through police corruption and finally ends with an assassination. I would couch that in a spoiler warning, but I want to avoid repetition and thus see no need to mention that this is a Brian De Palma movie a second time. It's the start of a shallow but merry and hysterically over-intricate journey into late-Clinton America, a time of economic success and almost-grating peace, of a country so well off it's now darkly quaint to think how badly everyone wanted something interesting to happen.

Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?

Season of the Witch

A recent College Humor video humorously posited the life of Nicolas Cage's agent, a man forced to contend with his client's perennial inability to say "no" to any project in order to keep himself in castles and pyramids. But that sketch, of course, was lighthearted and broad, building the man's outsized grief at being saddled with Cage's willingness to do everything and dilute his brand until the pain reached a frenzy. I like to imagine Cage's agent as a man who expresses his sorrow in the opposite fashion, silently nodding with resignation as his client agrees to be in the latest piece of crap, hanging up the phone and reaching for a home blood pressure kit to test his heart.

He must have had to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue when Cage signed onto Season of the Witch, a film that all but begs comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail despite its straight face. As with that legendary comedy, Season moves largely in a series of vignettes vaguely resembling a plot, but where that played into the Pythons' sketch comedy genius, Season merely moves as if caught in the death rattle of the Black Plague, leaking pustules of narrative drying and caking around swollen nodes of plagiarized fantasy tropes. The plague features prominently in Dominic Sena's film, and I found myself in the unexpected position of feeling sorry for a pandemic disease.

Opening with a scene with only the slightest bearing on the rest of the film, Season of the Witch establishes its style -- for want of a better term -- instantly, carving out its identity with disorienting edits, a slew of references to other (and better) movies and an adherence to historical accuracy that could charitably be described as laughable. Three women accused of witchcraft receive the farcical trial afforded to heretical suspects before being chucked off a bridge with ropes around their necks before their corpses are lowered into the river below, hydroponically planting the corpses in such a way that one simply must expect something bad to happen soon (does that then make this the Spring of the Witch?). A priest wishes to read an incantation to ensure the accused witches stay dead, but a knight says that a hanging and drowning were sufficient. In the interest of honesty, I should say I found this a fair and logical assessment. But of course, they should have let that monk read from his blinged-out book, and soon a drowned woman comes back long enough to wreak a bit of havoc before heading...to some other damn movie, apparently.

But don't think about that, 'cause here comes a Crusade montage. Thousands of miles away, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman), two knights in service to the Church, gleefully hack their way through Saracens and other enemies of God. Whatever statement Sena might have wanted to make about the hypocrisy of religious purity -- and Lord does he want to make that point -- gets swallowed up in the fun he has clumsily staggering through this montage, broken up briefly by a "wait, what?" shot of the two knights reveling in the most minimalistic medieval tavern ever set up on an empty stage before returning immediately to more shots of God's warrior tearing through the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Unhelpful title cards provide no sense of logical progression -- they seem to go into the Middle East, return to Europe to fight dissident Christians and then back to Smyrna for a bit of Turkish delight.

But then, after years of killing, Behmen accidentally stabs a woman whose protracted death gasp stuns the man into suddenly giving up his ways and returning to England with Felson, only to immediately be recruited once more by a monk who believes the outbreak of bubonic plague in the knights' absence can be attributed to a young woman who has "confessed" to being a witch. A monk, Debelzaq (seriously?), charges the deserters with helping deliver her to trial in some mysterious monastery, the location of which he barely knows. "I serve the Church no more," Behmen intones with solemn finality, about five minutes before he willingly serves the Church again.

And there, after 20 minutes of largely unconnected, gaudy visuals, ends the plot. The rest of Season of the Witch gets by on weak jump scares, poorly choreographed suspense sequences and dialogue so stale you could store it for food on the long journey to the New World, which of course wouldn't be discovered for another century after the timeline of this film but why should I be held to an accurate, linear account of history when no one involved with the film was? Out of context, some lines attain a terrific comedy: one of the women at the beginning about to be hanged pleads innocence for her ointments. "It was just pig fat," she shrieks with wild eyes. "It wasn't witchcraft!" In one scene, Felson undercuts Behmen's religious rants by saying "Keep your souls. I just want a chicken." Behind him is an untended, well-fed dairy cow that could provide drink and meat in much larger quantities. In context, the lines pile up in collisions of exposition, a crisscrossing web of dialogue as self-defeating as the contradictory plots and themes that dialogue attempts to elucidate.

Nothing in this movie fits together, as if someone attempted to complete a single puzzle with the pieces from five or six separate boxes. The only chemistry that exists between Cage and Perlman must be drawn from the juxtaposition of their faces, Cage's giant forehead playing off Perlman's massive, sloping jawline (Perlman's head is so huge that he can make medium shots into de facto close-ups). Perlman, the only decent aspect of the film, brings his one-man, don't-give-a-damn swagger from Hellboy to the role, making him mesmerizing despite his clunky dialogue (nothing but references to food and sex) but solitary, while Nicolas Cage has the look in his eye of a gold digger lying there and thinking of the Lambourgini that's coming his way once the old bastard dies. A veritable "who's that?" fills out the rest of the cast, some of whom are getting their first major international exposure in a manner they will no doubt attempt to hide in the coming years. Oh, but Christopher Lee shows up for a cameo as a dying cardinal with the world's worst zit, inspiring the question, "Is Christopher Lee running out of money?" God damn it, David Cameron, I don't care how bad the economy is; give this man his proper pension. When FDR installed Social Security as a means of protecting the dignity of the elderly, this has to be what he had in mind.

What the hell even happens in this movie? How can a plot so linear and derivative yet so incomprehensible? Everything exists as a storyboarded sequence, though that would imply that enough planning went into the movie that even a connected series of suspense and action scenes might have arisen from pre-production. Season of the Witch moves through so many Tolkien ripoffs that one setpiece impressively manages to plagiarize Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep in one go. They wade around a bit in a forest, engaging in one of the dullest rickety bridge segments I have ever seen, and there is in fact competition for so narrow a scenario. Sena's camera moves with all the precision of a North Korean nuke, though it makes me just as wary: no spatial continuity exists between random close-ups and medium shots that make up all action shots. Even establishing shots don't help, and most long shots appear to move away from the action as if the DP was trying to slink out of the project as surreptitiously as possible. Poor Claire Foy, in her big-screen debut, is forced to oscillate so rapidly between shivering innocent and manipulative, sinister harpy that one could use her performance as a fan.

So jumbled and meaningless is the film that whatever points Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut (who undoubtedly uses the middle initial to distinguish himself among the other Bragi Schuts) might have made are instantly canceled out by a plot contrivance that occurs typically minutes later. Behmen has seen the evil of the Church and both he and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen) know that religious leaders use witch trials to eradicate dissidents and those who don't fit neatly into the Church's vision of the ideal society. Oh, but wait, there actually are witches and demons so some of these hanging/drowning/inexplicably necessary incantations are clearly justified. Ergo, a few holy men might be full of hot air, but the Church itself is founded on a true basis of supernatural connection and some of the most grisly executions in human history are warranted. Likewise, someone finally has the sense to point out the protagonist cannot atone for years of atrocity by saving one pretty girl, but then that's exactly how how Behmen redeems himself.

That's what makes the film's smug tone all the more infuriating. It actually thinks itself clever, gracelessly speaking aloud its perceived subversion before showing another picture entirely. But everyone involved clearly thought they were making something intelligent until the focused looks begin to slack off about halfway through and Cage starts letting his hair do the acting. Sena even had the audacity to cite The Seventh Seal, one of the landmarks of film history, as a key inspiration. One can almost imagine the haughty son of a bitch lounging in an interview, casually taking a pull from a long cigarette and unironically saying, "Well, I felt a certain intuitive bond with witchcraft, because I'm in the business of making magic."

Season of the Witch has that cheap blue-gray glaze that directors like to use to instill a sense of chilly foreboding and despair, but I didn't need color suggestion for this film to make me sad. Compared to the host of oneiric films last year that incorporated dreams and highly subjective filmmaking into corkscrewing narratives, the third-person distance of Season of the Witch should make the movie far more linear, yet the lazy abandon of continuity and thematic development made the film so hard to follow that those series of useless title cards upfront become even more offensive in their inefficiency. We are spared even the glorious overreaction of Nicolas Cage's weirdness, and I feared that the accused witch at the beginning got that pig fat for her ointments by draining that glistening ham that is an unleashed Cage. Too dully self-confident and plodding to work as unintentional humor, Season of the Witch denied me even the thrill of a Nic Cage stinker. I'm giving the film one star, and that's solely for the brief flash of unintentional humor that had me rolling: a freeze-frame on Cage's face that looks as if someone snapped a drunken self-portrait at a Renaissance Fair-themed frat party. It's magnificent: the shot is supposed to move the audience, and I had tears in my eyes, all right.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

It never occurred to me in the initial round of trailers that The Sorcerer's Apprentice is based on the classic segment of Fantasia; with no hint of a connection in the first trailer, why would anyone? Only when I got to a theater early one time and saw one of those extended previews that starts before the actual previews -- can't they just shove all the regular ads for Coca-Cola and such into that space and devote some time during the coming attractions to spotlight a particular film? -- did the filmmakers mention in talking heads the source of the film's inspiration. When I heard that, all I could think was, "Why bother? Did anyone watch that animated classic and wonder what it would be like if Mickey were substituted for a nasally Canadian geek?"

This ran through my mind almost constantly as the film played. Director Jon Turteltaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are two filmmakers always in search of grand spectacle, yet the great irony of the finished product is that they manage to remove the magic of the original. Instead, they subject an audience to a disconnected series of sporadically stunning magic fights, not a one of which communicates the wonder or the seductive properties of magical powers.

The nasally Canadian geek in question is Dave Stutler, shown first as a 10-year-old who stumbles into a dusty magic shop on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty and meets Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage), a centuries-old sorcerer who apprentice under Merlin (yes, the Merlin). Seeking the prophesied child who will rid the world of Morgan le Fay, whom Balthazar keeps trapped in a Russian doll-like device called a Grimlock. The sorcerer discovers that the boy is indeed the one he's sought for 1300 years, but an intervening attack from rogue sorcerer Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina) results in the two wizards trapping themselves in a mystical vase and leaving a frantic Dave to try to explain himself to his peers, in water-soaked pants that the children take for proof of urination, no less.

This comprises the first 15 minutes of the film, and I've spared you the prologue in 750 A.D. and the thick exposition Cage has to deliver to a 10-year-old. Turteltaub and Bruckheimer's previous team-ups, the National Treasure films, made American history into something genuinely captivating for younger audiences; granted, they did so by turning history into fiction and sprinkling in an unacceptable dose of Dan Brown -- any dosage of Dan Brown is unacceptable -- but the cumbersome dialogue gave way to a believable enthusiasm for the subject, and the look of reverence and uncontainable glee on Cage's face as he pored over documents sold the film better than any of its action scenes.

Why, then, do the director and producer not extend the same care to the boundless opportunities of magic? When an older Dave (Jay Baruchel), having since suffered a breakdown over the immense shame of that event 10 years prior, meets Balthazar again and learns that he will himself become a sorcerer, he reacts with perfunctory skittishness instead of unvarnished excitement. Here is a nobody, a physics nerd who honed his genius partly due to his innate cranial capacity but also as a side-effect of hiding from the world after his ridicule, suddenly told that he can wield the power of a god, and the best he can muster is, "Sweet."

Baruchel is slowly but steadily gaining traction in my mind as a viable alternative to the Michael Cera/Jesse Eisenberg school of geeky detachment; he's endearingly awkward and believably sweet where Cera has an edge to him and Eisenberg falls somewhere in-between. But he's shackled here, unable to explore the emotions that would run through the head of the typical hero in training whose life turns upside down for the better. All he can do is make a few wisecracks, which he always backpedals out of cowardice in the face of stronger wizards, or women.

More tragic is the waste of Cage. To paraphrase Richard Roeper, the rule of thumb for the quality of Nicolas Cage's performance in any film can be directly tied to his hair: the sillier the wig, the more outlandish the performance. The Sorcerer's Apprentice bucks this trend, and that's not a good thing. Rather than the magnificently campy Nic Cage who commits to kitsch more completely than anyone, we get a neutered Nic. Despite the kooky nature of his character, a millennium-old sorcerer whose methods of training Dave in the ways of the "sacred art" recall Rip Torn's mad coach from Dodgeball, Cage heads in the opposite direction, turning his usual manic energy inward until he delivers every line with grave severity. Amazingly, Molina brings the camp more readily than Cage, all bored villain who kills anyone who remotely crosses him out of exasperation for the inanity of mankind. His snarled threats and incessant sighs of loathing are the film's only steady source of entertainment.

Nothing makes any blasted sense in this movie, and not in the way that would make for a better depiction of magic. Dave's proficiency with magic depends entirely on plot convenience: without a single lesson and only a vague instruction, the boy manages to take out a deadly sorcerer, then spends the rest of the film ineptly practicing and quitting magic out of frustration, only to intermittently control his powers with mastery. There's no logic to his progression, simply contrivance after contrivance that robs Dave's evolution of any meaning or weight. Even the moment that recreates the possessed broom bit of the original Fantasia sequence doesn't conjure memories of that animated masterpiece but raise the question of how Dave, who five minutes ago couldn't perform a single spell with consistency, can suddenly summon an army of the inanimate.

Occasionally, a funny line seeps through, such as the confrontation between Dave and a vain disciple of le Fay who made his living as a Vegas magician, in which the villain cannot believe that the boy doesn't know who he is. "Are you in Depeche Mode?" Dave asks the spiky-haired, New Wave-looking fool. The romantic subplot between Dave and Becky (Teresa Palmer), the girl he liked back in fourth grade before his breakdown forced him to transfer schools, exists mainly to give the villains some leverage against Dave and to prove that old point about love being what allows good to triumph over evil. The two do, however, share a surprisingly touching scene involving Dave's Tesla coil and the musical sounds its sparks emit.

But too much of The Sorcerer's Apprentice is somber, treating the ineffable wonder, the magic of magic, with the same solemn reverence afforded to history in National Treasure, fictionalized as it was. I haven't seen Nicolas Cage give such a lifeless performance in years; never before has he so blatantly looked as if he's only doing the job for the paycheck. I expected little from the film and was still disappointed, my eye occasionally catching on something of interest only to return back to the sheer dullness of it all. Everyone involved takes a narrative and emotional shortcut, avoiding anything that sticks in the mind in favor of silliness. I return to a scene in the film where Balthazar chastises Dave about distractions whilst wearing a hat that directs any and all attention onto itself. Somehow, the entire movie is in that throwaway moment.

Bringing Out the Dead

In preparation for the upcoming Martin Scorsese Blog-a-Thong for the Large Association of Movie Blogs, the following is a re-write of the first Scorsese movie I ever reviewed on this blog. I've scrapped the first entirely in favor of this review for two reasons: 1) My opinion of the film, which was already positive, has changed considerably, to the point that I consider it the director's second-most underrated film after his satirical masterpiece The King of Comedy, and 2) because the first article was unsatisfactory on every level, a shoddy reiteration of plot with little interpretation.

David Bordwell recently posted an article -- to call attention to its quality would suggest that Bordwell (or his wife, Kristen Thompson, for that matter) is ever not at his best -- that outlined Martin Scorsese's use of both French Impressionism and German Expressionism in his work. Anyone who truly pays attention to the director's films will know that the "realism" label bandied about without a care holds no weight: Scorsese's impeccable eye for detail and character certainly add a bedrock of verisimilitude to his corpus, but even the exacting production design of Gangs of New York is interpretative.

This is relevant because, of all the director's films, none throws any pretense at realism to the wind quite like Bringing Out the Dead. Its first moments, a shot of an ambulance speeding through Hell's Kitchen that cuts to the eyes of its driver, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), being processed through numerous color filters as he careens through the city at warp-speed (a direct reference to the first shots of Taxi Driver, albeit played in fast-forward). These shots, and their existence as a frenzied update of Scorsese's greatest film, set the tone of the film: Taxi Driver cooled enough to use its protagonist's mental state to explore larger issues, but Bringing Out the Dead never leaves its tortured insomniac, never allows for anything but the slightest break for air.

It's fitting that, to date, the film should mark the last collaboration between Scorsese and Paul Schrader, as the film shares stylistic -- even narrative ties -- to not just Taxi Driver but Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ as well. The imagery of blurred lights, ubiquitous steam and cascading colors updates Taxi Driver with better technology and more money, yet Scorsese heightens them not simply because he enjoys a bigger budget but because of the lack of control Pierce has over his life; unlike Travis Bickle, Pierce is not the steady pilot of the vessel that ferries him through hell. Objects appear normally, after all, in the windshield; they only blur as you pass them. Pierce agrees: "The biggest problem with not driving is that whenever there's a patient in the back, you're also in the back. The door's closed. You're trapped."

Pierce himself contains elements of Jake LaMotta (his blindness to anything but his own pain and desires) and Bickle (take your pick), but the character he most resembles, after a fashion, is Scorsese's Jesus. Pierce cannot sleep because he's been unable to save any of his patients recently. This failure to literally save people recalls Jesus' doubt over his own message, which the people in Last Temptation begin to distort even before his death, centuries before His word would be completely corrupted by the Crusades and various inquisitions. Pierce, however, cannot seem to manage any sort of salvation: in his first shown assignment, he tends to a man in cardiac arrest who by all accounts is a goner. But he instructs the family, crowded around in fear and the mounting grief of lost hope to play some music that the man liked, as it "helps." Pierce than manages to get a pulse, but this "miracle" clearly had little to do with the Sinatra croon wafting through the apartment, its purpose merely to distract the family from their pain. The man, as we'll see throughout the film, didn't die because of the music, or even because of Frank and his defibrillator, but because Hell's Kitchen has torn him down too many times without killing him that he's not about to start now.

That patient hangs over the rest of the film, in a constant flux between life and death -- he flatlines a dozen times a day and is brought back each time. References are made to his "fighting spirit," but the darker implication is that he fights to die, not to live. He instructed his family not to call 911 and even locked himself in the bathroom to prevent easy access. Thus, this patient comes to embody Pierce's growing self-doubt and his troubling new ideas: "In the last year," he says, "I'd come to believe in such things as spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back. Spirits angry at the awkward places death had left them." Frank, with his twisted messiah complex, slowly kills himself for the sake of his patients, and his constant losses wreak havoc with his head. Suddenly, his ideas of saving others begin to lose their pull: "I came to realize that my work was less about saving lives than about bearing witness," he says. "I was a grief mop." Ergo, Pierce serves not only as a Christ figure but his own apostle, attempting to save lives and consoling others (and himself) when he fails.

The other reason that the ever vacillating man plays into the story is in the introduction of his daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette), one of the more compelling female characters to grace a Scorsese film. Mary, like Frank, cannot decide whether she wants her father to live or die, having suffered abuse as a child yet still unable to let the man go. Arquette excels at these characters, broken women fragile enough to need help in this world yet strong and determined enough to boost others. As such, she becomes Pierce's focus, neither as a love interest nor (à la Bickle) a symbol of anything but simply as the person who may hold the key to his stability, just as he, a kind man in a horrible city, may give Mary the support she's never had.

It's scarcely conceivable that anyone could get by in Scorsese's image of Hell's Kitchen on their own, though so many are made to. Taxi Driver spread its hellish effect over all of New York City, but Bringing Out the Dead reveals that the expanse of New York's hell was actually a dissipation of evil. Hell's Kitchen concentrates that evil into a subsection filled with despair, and its nightmarish imagery is all the more arresting because it's so much easier to identify with Frank and his perception of this nightmarish world. The hospital where he brings his patient, Our Lady of Mercy, is dubbed Misery by its patients and staff; whenever Scorsese returns to it, scanning over its aisles choked with patients who outnumber the rooms, the cops who spend so much time dealing with the wounded criminals and overdosing junkies that they, in their harsh black uniforms, become as much a part of the hospital staff as the white-clad nurses and doctors, who are hardly more sympathetic than the merciless cops. The streets are covered with brain-fried, punch-drunk loonies who cannot be called gutter trash because the gutters are too full to accommodate them. It's such a terrifying microcosm that a dying man (Michael K. Williams) swears that if he lives he'll join the army "where it's safe."

As is fitting for the work of a paramedic, Bringing Out the Dead is very episodic; spread across three nights, each night pairs Frank with another EMT who also suffers from the constant stress of so much death and pain, and each night he travels through segments of the larger segment that is Hell's Kitchen. On the first night, Frank travels with Larry, who attempts to outpace his own breakdown by focusing on the next meal. He cannot eat the same meal two nights in a row, because remembering what he ate the previous night might also conjure memories of the trauma to which he attended. Larry would typically like to avoid as many jobs as he can, so Frank must take the initiative to respond to any call. By the second night, though, Frank is the one who wants a break, which he never receives as Marcus (Ving Rhames) zealously pilots their ambulance to every incident in search of "miracles." Marcus spends the night railing about the Gospels and preaching like an evangelist at the scene of an accident, but his constant flirting with the female dispatcher with whom he shares a dalliance undermines his piety. Marcus and Frank are even present for what someone insists is a virgin birth, of twins no less, but Frank cannot accept this as the miracle that Marcus does as one of the twins -- the one he handles -- dies from complications. Of course, no one really believes that the woman gave birth as a virgin, save the man who saved himself for her.

Marcus' outlandish personality -- as well as his hair, which manages to be both curly and slicked back -- somewhat recalls Screamin' Jay Hawkins, which is appropriate for what is by far Scorsese's most pop music-oriented film; Martha and the Vandellas, Van Morrision, Sinatra, The Who, The Rolling Stones and so many more make appearances, generally increasing in rocking edge as the film wears on and Frank's resolve wears.

So, by the time that Frank teams up with Wolls (Tom Sizemore), whose own frustration with his job has manifested itself in anti-Hippocratic rage against his patients (or victims), the soundtrack is dominated by such punk rockers as The Clash and Johnny Thunders. Frank teeters on the brink by this point, and what is most affecting about Wolls' outbursts is not how insane and violent they are but how closely they mirror the final stages of Frank's self-annihilation. Despite his constant warnings against Wolls' behavior, Frank's first major breakthrough comes when he screams at a suicidal man and offers to help the man kill himself, who flees in terror; "We cured him!" Wolls laughs, but the absurdity of the moment is undercut by the realization that it really is the first person we've seen who might be better off for Frank's intervention. Later, a junkie, Noel, who appears every night in some fit of chemical (internal and external) imbalance and incurs Wolls' wrath, manages to redirect Frank's own budding madness; Frank and Wolls catch him smashing cars with a baseball bat, but when Frank agrees to help Wolls catch and beat Noel, he ends up venting his anger by hitting a car of his own.

The dark comedy of this moment pervades the film. Frank, disillusioned with his role as a savior incapable of rescuing others, wants to stop his torture but cannot bring himself to stop self-harming on his own (a Scorsesian theme that stretches back to his 1967 short The Big Shave). So, he reports to each of his shifts late, or leaves early to try to get some sleep that never comes; his captain finally confronts him on this, but he's got a wild hair up his ass that transforms his anger at Frank for sloppy work into self-righteous defiance of the system. Frank does everything but come right out and beg to be released from this torment, but the captain interprets the rage as a sign of dedication and not only retains Frank but offers the "unlucky" son of a bitch an extra week of sick time. So many people return to Misery for drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning and brawl wounds that the head nurse (Mary Beth Hurt) knows many patients by name and chastises them and threatens to withhold treatment like a mother exercising tough love.

This lunacy adds to the warped perception of Hell's Kitchen, which results in some of Scorsese's boldest visual invention. The lights around the ambulance seem to blur as they're seen through the tears caught in Frank's eyes: he never quite cries after all, no matter how close he comes. The ambulance moves through Hell's Kitchen in such a frenzy that Scorsese films it from above, or with the camera entirely on it side, and images are often processed through the windows and mirrors of the vehicle, distorting if not completely destroying them. Just as Scorsese had characters glide in Mean Streets and GoodFellas to show how they perceived the places they felt most welcome, so too does he fluidly rush up the stairs to get Frank and Larry to Mary's father. Frank hallucinates a stoned dream of the ghosts of those he failed to save reaching up to him from a street pavement as he literally raises the dead, and a recurring image of a young girl named Rose, whose death set his collapse in motion, tortures Frank (this would of course be reworked and used again in Shutter Island). And few scenes in all of Scorsese's canon are as shamelessly Expressionistic (or bizarre) as his rescue of the drug dealer, somewhat kind and somewhat evil, impaled upon a metal girder below his apartment window. As Frank makes his first unmistakable, physical save of the film, the blowtorch cutting the girder sends up sparks. Almost romantically, with Frank cradling the weakened dealer's head, no less, Cyrus remarks that he can feel the heat of the warming metal, which pierced his chest. With such unabashed artistic touches, is it any wonder that the usual hospital dispatcher who sends Frank on these assignments is voiced by Scorsese himself?

Cage pours all of himself into the role, as the part could not work with any less an effort. His hangdog expression is perfect for such a downtrodden character; when he tiredly counters Mary's fleeting attempts to justify her father's past behavior as a method to make her strong to survive the city with, "The city doesn't discriminate. It gets everybody," his fatalism seems more human and strangely empathetic than cynical. That perverse humanism defines his final act, in which he puts Mary's father out of his misery rather than force the man to live with a micro-defibrillator in his heart for the rest of his life simply to sate Frank's need to keep someone alive. Searing, white light often highlights action in Bringing Out the Dead, usually when focusing on the dead and dying. It's an ironic use of holy light to show the terrible act of death, but then there's always been a certain contradiction between the horror of mortality and the hope of everlasting life it brings. By allowing Mary's father to die, however, and by returning to Mary, Frank not only releases the messiah complex that keeps him up, he also attains some of the holiness he so desperately chased, at last falling asleep in Mary's arms as Scorsese bathes in light. Travis Bickle's "redemption" was caked in blood, but Frank attains his by the absence of the red stuff that coats him everywhere else. As perfect as they were for each other, Schrader and Scorsese would do well to not undermine the chapter-closing image of this last shot, content to let it summarize their remarkable work together and to bide its time until people at last realize what they've overlooked.

Kick-Ass

It is of no particular use to discuss Kick-Ass, far ahead of the pack of what will eventually be the most debated films of the year, with anything approaching the false objectivity of holistic criticism. You know the sort, the reviewing style in which, one hopes, the critic does write about his or her own response to the film among the more objective and studious observations, albeit without the use of the dreaded 'I' as if writing from the darkest nightmare of Ayn Rand. Kick-Ass, based on Mark Millar's gonzo (is he ever anything else but?) comic series about teenage vigilantism, announces itself as a love-it-or-hate-it picture from the start, generating such a forceful schism between vitriolic rejection and open adoration that it appears to be the geek version of Antichrist.

At least Lars von Trier's helter-skelter mind- and soul-fuck had something to say, though I'll be damned if I quite know what it is yet. The appeal (and point of contention) of Kick-Ass is that it does not seem to have anything to say at all, though its most vocal defenders insist that the naysayers simply didn't "get" it. But is there anything to get? Mark Millar's comic, written along with the movie script, follows an altogether unremarkable young man, gifted with neither powers, intellect, sophisticated gadgetry nor even a solid physique who decides to become a superhero just to give his life some purpose.

Vaughn and Jane Goldman's adaptation, however, takes a left turn in quick order that throws this premise completely out the window. On his first night out in a wetsuit costume, ho-hum loser Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) attempts to stop a carjacking and gets a knife to the stomach for his troubles. It's a moment that distills the difference between fantasy and reality, a rude awakening for the kid who thought his antics might get him some popularity. Then, everything changes. Doctors place so many metal pieces in Dave's body to strengthen his bones that even the kid remarks his similarity to Wolverine, and the attack fried his nerve endings, allowing him to absorb large amounts of abuse without feeling pain. Granted, it's not flight or laser vision, but that shift changes the entire dynamic of the film: it's no longer a story about an average kid trying to be a hero but an empowered teen who's simply untrained and rough around the edges.

So, Dave now experiences some success as Kick-Ass, not foiling the beating of a man on the street so much as transferring that beating onto himself and withstanding long enough that the attackers simply leave and bystanders with cell-phone cameras turn the hapless, baton-whirling teen into a sensation. And then...what? Dave, purposefully made as banal as possible to strip him of any attribute that might serve him in his night job, does not resonate for the exact same reason. He has a crush on the popular girl, Katie (Lyndsy Fonesca), hangs out with his two wittier friends (Clark Duke and Evan Peters, adhering to the rule that all adolescents travel in trios) and fantasizes about his buxom teacher. That's about as far as we go with his character, even when rumors arise in school that Dave's constant bruises and cuts are the result of him being a gay prostitute, a rumor that, of course, brings him closer to the in-mandated-need-for-a-gay-best-friend Katie.

The only characters of any true interest are Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, spouting a hilarious Adam West impersonation) and Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz). Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are, as Dave notes, "the real deal," taking vigilantism to shocking heights with madcap killing sprees executed with precision. The two have an actual story and motivation, unlike Dave, who routinely steals attention away from the gonzo pair for his insipid journeys through the motions of comic book tropes, never conveyed through action but spoken aloud and immediately undercut by another bit of dialogue, empty boasts of self-awareness. Dave's relationship with Katie, with its usage of tired situations that read like Three's Company leftovers that climax in a Big Misunderstanding scene which manages to fly in the face of what meager characterization exists between the two. When Dave first sees Hit-Girl and Big Daddy in action, he realizes how out of his depth he was to pretend to be a hero when this finely conditioned vigilantes roamed the same streets. If only Vaughn agreed with the protagonist; Millar purportedly intended the two to be the main focus of the story, but altered his approach as an unremarkable teenager made for easier identification than such extreme characters. Yet the audience can identify with Big Daddy and Hit-Girl more readily as they have some sort of personality.

Kick-Ass even lives up to its promise of giddy mayhem when Vaughn cedes the floor to the destructive tag-team. Moretz completely steals the show as the profane and hyperviolent Hit-Girl, with her hot pink wig and arsenal of blades and pistols. Capable of portraying both the unstoppable assassin and the adorable, if ludicrously maladjusted, 11-year-old girl inside the costume, Moretz gives one of the most memorable performances by a child in recent years; no wonder, then, that she's been tapped to play the vampire in the (wholly unnecessary) American remake of Let the Right One In, a role that gave audiences the other great young female performance of recent cinema.

But even her terrific presence is undone by the extremity of her actions. Unlike most of the film's critics, I find nothing particularly offensive about most of the film's ultraviolence. That's actually the problem: Vaughn so stylizes the bloodshed, with the typical slow-motion and fast editing that directors continue to mine from The Matrix, that it has no meaning. Death has no sense of finality in Kick-Ass, save the times when, perversely, it is at its most absurd. The hordes of thugs Hit-Girl cut down do not register a second thought, but a man shoved into a giant microwave(?) offers at least a moment of reflection for the audience, before Vaughn then plays that moment for laughs. Sin City had the same cartoonish violence, but it also had an emotional core that Kick-Ass lacks and so desperately needs. In one scene, the only truly serious one of the film, Vaughn veers so close to genuine meditation on the price of vigilantism, the blind quest for revenge and how the evil that exists in the real world is no better than the exaggerated archvillains of the comics that he runs in the opposite direction as if afraid of his own intelligence. Kick-Ass' final act replaces the wheel-spinning repetition of the first half with the utter insanity that it only hinted at previously. But the payoff fails to live up to the hype, moving even farther away from any sense of relatability until one cannot even compare the violence to that of a video game; video games have progressed too much to insult them so.

I feel like I'm spinning my own wheels now, but the inexplicably (yet inevitably) positive reaction carries with it the sort of mind-boggling defense that makes the film impenetrable. This film has no point, not in the sense of anything so high-minded as "theme" or "subtext" but in the sheer absence of any reason to watch it. "But it doesn't need a reason," shout its defenders, "It's fun!" Setting aside personal reactions to the film's supposedly enjoyable elements, this argument holds no water for two important reasons: 1) these same people are calling Kick-Ass a satire, or at least subversive -- an understandable mistake, as the brain searches for meaning when none is immediately apparent, as it is certainly not here; Un Chien Andalou is so timeless precisely because Buñuel and Dali intentionally robbed the short's incomprehensible images of even symbolic value. 2) Since when is it artistically bold to make a stupid movie? I am so sick of this asinine illogic, the notion that it takes courage to aim low, as if the cinematic landscape is not already littered with pointless, plot-less behemoths that snake their tendrils into your wallets. It's that line of reasoning that keeps hundreds of intelligent films out of the vast majority of American theaters, and God only knows how many scripts from being developed. And don't tell anyone who doesn't like a film that they just don't "get" it.

Christ, even the filmmakers have insisted that they've made something smart and unique. Matthew Vaughn said that Kick-Ass "has broken every rule." What rule did it break? A child uses the c-word. Goodness gracious. She also kills, and anyone who thinks that a schoolgirl wreaking havoc on men is fresh must think that Japan's only cultural export is a large number of America's best baseball players. Vaughn didn't stop there, going so far as to cite each aspect of production as unique, touching upon "the way it was made, the way it was written, the way it was financed, the way it was directed. We didn’t do anything by the book. Maybe that’s why it feels so fresh.” Let's break this down: Kick-Ass was written as its source material was being written. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke did the same with 2001: A Space Odyssey and made two fascinating but vastly different takes on Clarke's vision, each with their own merits. Vaughn just simplified Millar's wryer and more decadently cynical take on the premise into something more fit for mass consumption. Too many films have been self-financed to pause for a second on his second point, and Kick-Ass isn't even the first self-financed, hyperviolent blockbuster meant for the instant gratification of a wide audience; I am of course speaking of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. As for direction, Kick-Ass steals so many cues from The Matrix and from Vaughn's old collaborator Guy Ritchie (including Ritchie alumni Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher, playing Italian wise guys because why the hell not) that the only artistically bold choice of the film was claiming originality. Perhaps Vaughn meant that last point literally, that the manner in which he shot the film was different. Maybe he suspended himself from the ceiling upside-down while he was looking through the viewfinder.

His assertion of Kick-Ass' "freshness" underlines the film's failure. It's trying to have its cake and eat it too, politically incorrect just to drum up some controversy and interest even as it insists that its madness has some method. I spent so many drafts and rewrites addressing points I disliked and then re-addressing them to deal with the perceived catcalls of "that was the point!" to come that I nearly gave myself a migraine, so let me instead save you the trouble of reading an even longer, even more circular diatribe by saying this: I don't care whether Kick-Ass was supposed to be stupid. It has nothing to give its audience; it can only take two hours away from them. Shocked laughs give way to the realization that so little was actually funny, and the protagonist quickly becomes an unfortunate obstacle between the audience and the father-daughter duo that offers the only consistent entertainment. Kick-Ass is supposed to be about an aimless teen and his aimless plan to be a hero, yet even the plot abandons him when Big Daddy and Hit-Girl come along with a possible narrative to latch onto. Their story, by the way, is the exact sort of hero origin tale that Dave Lizewski adamantly states he does not have, and it's one more reason this faux-subversive comic book flick fails to break the rules it thinks it can shatter with its carnage. Kick-Ass wants to be dumb in a smart way, and it makes itself into an idiot in the process.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

The release of every new Nicolas Cage feature brings with it a question: will we be getting the Nicolas Cage of actorly fearlessness -- the one who will go to any lengths for his character in films like Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas and Bringing Out the Dead -- or the Nicolas Cage who looked at the paycheck and not the script, who is just as fearless but in all the wrong ways. You know, the Cage who will thunder such choice lines as "HOW'D IT GET BURRRRRNNNED?!" like William Shatner's mentally deficient, incestuous lovechild.

With Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, Werner Herzog's kind-of, sort-of, not-even-remotely remake/sequel of Abel Ferrara's 1992 opus, the answer to that question is "yes." Cage's Terrence McDonagh roams the streets of a post-Katrina New Orleans looking for any means to distract him from the back pain he suffered in an uncharacteristic display of heroism, as much a junkie as the suspects he questions in the case of murdered African immigrants. Were this anyone else's movie -- and I promise that it couldn't possibly be -- Terrence might be a symbol of the U.S. government's appalling reaction to the hurricane, his stance as the lawman who ignores the law cruising uncomfortably close to the hysterical reactions to looting and the Bush administration's despicable inaction. And perhaps, in some way, it is; in response to my recent review of Aguirre and my brief discussion of the warped colonial microcosm Herzog created, Ed Howard (author of the estimable blog Only the Cinema) remarked that political readings of Herzog's work are too narrow, that the auteur cares for the endless contradictions and mysteries of humanity itself and not the petty ways in which it is expressed. He's absolutely right, but I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss potential political explorations within his corpus; one should not use them as a bedrock for criticism of the man, but politics are one way that the ideas and dreams of mankind are exhibited.

However, if I were to truly delve into Herzog's mind -- a terrifying prospect, but something a viewer must do with all of his films as they are so inexorably tied to his skewed perspective -- I would indeed expand the scope: Cage, clearly kneeling at the altar of Herzog's insane muse Klaus Kinski, is so unhinged that he becomes a force of nature. When those levees broke, water wasn't the only thing they unleashed upon New Orleans. McDonagh, who sees hallucinations of dancing souls and exerting an inexplicable control over those with whom he crosses paths. Katrina, it seems, set loose the white devil, master and slave to powders that have replaced old voodoo concoctions.

The thought of Werner Herzog directing a police procedural likely doesn't leap out at the average filmgoer as much as Nicolas Cage in a role that promises utmost hyperbole, which is a shame. If more people knew about the director, the prospect of him even nominally approaching such a plot-heavy genre as "crime drama" is funnier than anything Cage has ever done. Indeed, Bad Lieutenant takes so many left turns that the fleeting moments where it actually plays the genre straight are as uproarious as the rest of the film, which departs not only from any identifiable genre trappings but reality itself.

This is a film where a police detective rips out an elderly woman's oxygen hose to get information out of her caregiver. This is a film that cuts from a moment of rivalry between police officers to a shot of an alligator nearby. This is a film where that isn't the only cutaway to a reptile: it opens on a shot of a snake slithering through the fetid waters flowing in the city streets and features an extended sequence between Terrence and a pair of imaginary iguanas (singing iguanas, no less, and not of the computer-animated variety). "Who but Cage could regard an iguana sideways in a look of suspicion and disquiet?" asked Roger Ebert in his review of the film; "You need to keep an eye on an iguana. The bastards are always up to something." With all respect, Roger, I think the iguanas might be the ones casting glances at him.

Herzog has crafted here his finest and most inexplicable comedy since his great Stroszek, though even the broad brushstroke of comedy might still be to restrictive a label for this film. Herzog has directed numerous operas in his career, primarily the works of Richard Wagner (he even directed Lohengrin one year at Bayreuth, king of the opera/classical music festivals), and Bad Lieutenant is certainly outlandish enough for the stage. Unlike the serious-minded opera of Wagner, Bad Lieutenant recalls the comedic German opera of the singspiel, particularly semi-dramatic works like Beethoven's Fidelio (which also features a rescue in a cell and, even more incidentally, was once directed by Herzog).

As is nearly always the case with Herzog's films (at least on the first go), I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, yet I'm in love with its delirium. Herzog packed his cast with performers who are no strangers to going above and beyond the call of duty -- Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Val Kilmer(!) -- yet they seem to recognize that any attempts to approach Cage's mania would simply melt the film stock and give reserved but no less entertaining performances. Cage's, though, is his finest in years, his best since Lord of War if not his otherworldly turn in Adaptation: he is a star going nova, yet he also has his moments of lucidity and deduction, and we can see that he can be a good cop -- in a memorable early scene and the only one to completely work as a straight piece of cop drama, he displays a keen insight into interrogating suspects without forcing guns to their heads. The original Bad Lieutenant was no standard police drama, what with its deliberately suffocating Catholic guilt fogging over the narrative, and Herzog manages to sidestep the genre without using any of Ferrara's themes or techniques; as he did with his other, wonderful recent foray into American cinema, Rescue Dawn, Herzog displays just enough respect (or tolerance) for a rigid genre to dabble in it for a few moments before subverting everything in his path, not out of discontent and irascibility but through the simple nature of his being. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is a portrait of its titular city via its rampaging demon, giving its darkly humorous, endlessly quotable script an undercurrent of sadness: for once, the man who could dominate the world around him is not the hero of Herzog's focus but a tragic victim.