It would make sense that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans would have an occasionally prevalent fascination with dangerous animals getting too close to human pray. From Werner Herzog, the man that gave us Grizzly Man and numerous other documentaries, Bad Lieutenant opens with shots of snakes gliding across water. That water is flood water from Hurricane Katrina, and it’s seeped into the basement holding cells where one lone criminal finds himself caught between drowning or getting bit be something possibly poisonous (sorry, but I don’t know from snakes). As two cops take bets at the top of the landing as to what time the prisoner will drown under the rising water, you know immediately that this isn’t going to be an ordinary cop film.

It starts with the potent combination of Herzog and Nicolas Cage; both men in their way are iconoclasts, men who defy convention in their artistic decisions. Say what you want about some of those decisions, especially in Cage’s case, but only a man like Nicolas Cage could take the purified crap that was The Wicker Man and turn it slightly camp by exclaiming about his broken legs. Some directors are able to take Cage’s natural inclination to reach for the cheap seats with his over-acting and just le him run with it randomly, but some filmmakers know how to use it, and Herzog seems to be one of them. He lets Cage be Cage, but actually not too much.

In actuality, Bad Lieutenant probably owes as much to Grand Theft Auto as it does to typical cop movies like, well, I guess the original Bad Lieutenant starring Harvey Keitel. Cage’s Lt. Terrence McDonagh, having damaged his back saving the convict in the flood cell, is a rumpled wind-up toy of a detective in a cream-coloured suit, running on a likely dangerous combination of pain killers and cocaine. The death of a drug dealer six months after Katrina’s waters have receded ends up pushing McDonagh to the braking point as he loses the only witness to the crime while saving his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) from an abusive John that won’t pay. This John ends up having friends in high places, which leads McDonagh into another whole series of problems that have absolutely nothing to do with putting the gangster (played by rapper Xzibit) responsible for the murder of a family of 5 behind bars.

There are some dramatic elements in Bad Lieutenant, but I would never in a million years call it a police drama. What else would you call a comedy about a police detective whose drug induced delusions include iguanas and the break-dancing soul of a dead criminal but a comedy? Cage is on fire through this whole movie delivering line after line with a flair and a hint of derangement in a mix that the actor rarely seems to reach anymore either taking himself too seriously (The Weather Man), or not seriously enough (the aforementioned Wicker). There’s some pretty solid supporting work from Mendes, Xzibit, Shawn Hatosy, Brad Dourif and Val Kilmer too, but mostly this is Cage’s show and he really works it.

It’s been said before that cop movies come dangerously close to skirting the same ground over and over again: the loose cannon, the patient captain, the suspicious internal affairs guy, do-or-die final shoot outs that require neither a warrant or probably cause, the things that real life police people have to do, you know. Bad Lieutenant though isn’t about serious police work. It’s a Sergio Leone-style version of Twin Peaks with bizarre characters and even more bizarre circumstances. It says a lot that in the end, after going through the motions of fairly well-constructed script that Herzog throws a curveball as McDonagh sits at an aquarium and wonders if fish dream after everything works out for him in the end. At least the whole thing was rarely dull, and for that I can live with a little confusion.