The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Werner Herzog on a bigger budget than usual. Putatively a remake of Abel Ferrara's excellent, dark, tough original, this film in truth has next to nothing in common with that version.
At first, it suggests that it might be a disaster. It's difficult to buy the drug taking, which can seem rather tame, and the violence doesn't initially appear interesting. The cop case just seems like a bunch of cliches thrown together, the racial prophiling questionable. It is difficult to see what is going on with Herzog.
But things start to intrude. The great use of animals, your iguana-cam and Cage's illusions. The scenarios begin to break into absurdity. The rather dull central character becomes to start giggling at random moments. The it suddenly becomes clear; this film is a comedy, or rather a comedy of mania. From here on in, it has stretches of great entertainment, humour, and the kind of meta-cinema that genuinely is new.
Cage basically plays Kinski, with the madcap looks, the wild stares, the lean and bony face. The increasingly manic acting and plotlines are all backed up by the weight of non-comedic and sometimes rather plodding side-story, but this is necessary to see the full ridiculousness of the best bits.
Perhaps this film would have been better if it had decided to be a straight up farce. As it is, it has a kind of woozy, drowsy, feel, enlivened but the completely absurd completely intruding, all of a sudden and very violently, before dissappearing again. The blankness of certain characters as the mania unfolds is engaging and hillarious.
These developments can be read in two ways; either as a consequence of Cage's crack-use, or as Herzog trying to make a film in a different way. We would rather follow the latter. Sure, the opening is bad, and parts are slow and unfunny, but as noted this may be necessary to have the correct tone over which the moments of sublime ridiculousness can flourish. This is destined to be a cult movie, with some great absurdist lines and a scene where plot strands are tied up that is both hillarious and really quite a brave directoral move.
Takses its time to get going, and has to be watched a certain way, but Herzog has done something interesting and often a lot of fun here.