An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Critic rating
Reader rating
New York director Abel Ferrara is a touchy kind of guy. When he heard that his German colleague Werner Herzog and veteran producer Ed Pressman were planning a remake of his 1992 classic Bad Lieutenant, he said: “I wish these people die in hell.”
Likeable cop: Nicolas Cage with Eva Mendes in Venice
Herzog then returned the compliment by telling an interviewer: “I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is.” But the press corps who gathered for the Venice Film Festival world premiere of Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, soon forgot the spat.
We were playing “Where’s Werner?” For apart from a couple of odd flourishes that have nothing to do with the rest — an iguana-cam shot, the break-dancing soul of a freshly-killed gangster — there’s no sign of the visionary director of Woyzeck or Fitzcarraldo in this decent, well-scripted, reasonably engaging police procedural.
This remake-of-sorts proves an interesting point, however: that the same story nugget can give rise to two utterly different films.
Some of this has to do with the remake’s wholesale ditching of the original’s tortured Catholic subtext. But a lot more has to do with casting.
Harvey Keitel, the star of Ferrara’s original, can do real bad — the kind of bad you don’t ever want to meet.
Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, has something teddy-bearish about him, even when he’s ripping an old lady’s oxygen tube out of her nose to extort a confession.
Together: Cage and Mendes in the funny-tough remake of classic Bad Lieutenant
He may do crack, steal drugs from police lock-ups, accept sex in return for letting rich kids off a drug rap and blow his pay on gambling, but he’s likeable. He may look like death warmed up, but he drawls like Jimmy Stewart, and gets the really bad guys in the end.
It is a tasty, funny-tough cop thriller, with Eva Mendes, that exploits the miasmic atmosphere of post-Katrina New Orleans with competence. But if Ferrara’s original sets the benchmark for bad, the remake should have had a name change — to Naughty Lieutenant.
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