Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

“Shoot him again!” “What for?” “His soul is still dancing.”

Nominally a remake of the Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel film, PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS relocates from a wrecked New York City to the post-Katrina Big Easy. Terence McDonagh (A rarified Nicolas Cage) wades through the underbelly of New Orleans on a perpetual bender of pain-killers, cocaine, and an assortment of transgressions — he is the Bad Lieutenant, after all — to get to the bottom of a drug deal gone wrong. Marrying his trademark mega-acting with Werner Herzog’s fascination for outsized weirdos, Cage goes full Kinski in one of the most brazenly entertaining roles of his now heavily-meme’d career.