The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Does any one know what was going through Herzog's mind when he decided to pick up on the protagonist from Abel Ferrara's seminal 1992 odyssey through the sewers of the city and of a man's sense of self-worth, with an utterly corrupt police detective cast as Ulysses? Herzog doesn't do remakes like he doesn't do cop films, and yet here he is doing both.
Of course, it soon becomes apparent we've got quite a different beast on our hands, so different that not even crediting Ferrara makes sense by the end. Gone is the bribe-and-contraband pocketing Catholic's sense of guilt, replaced by just plain mental disintegration under the weight of this incarnation's even more crippling range of chemical and behavioural dependencies. Without even the shadow of faith in the background, there's no 11th-hour redemption on the cards, just a dwindling prospect of getting away scot-free.
And hence the lack of gravitas in the tone, reflected in the casting: whereas Harvey Keitel does haunted and tortured immaculately in the original, here the absence of any spiritual purpose to cling to requires casting in line with the farcical surrealism, and it's fair to say that for once Nicolas Cage fits the bill.
The end result, then, is a ride on its own terms through madness, that sucks you in through sheer unpredictability. But since it's also without a moral compass, once the end credits have rolled it sinks away without trace where Ferrara's version lingered.

5/10