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

A cop with chronic back pain becomes addicted to drugs, and from then on his life and career spirals down into a cesspool of corruption and violence.

Although the information is absent from the film credits, this is a remake of a 1992 Abel Ferrara film called simply "Bad Lieutenant". That film may be considered to be a bit of an oddity in its director's filmography, being as it was the product of an unusual collaboration between him and three actors turned screenwriters; the origin of the film's concept is to be credited, if I am not mistaken, to a late actress and writer named Zoë Tamerlis, also known as Zoë Lund. Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" was an account of the Christian religion as a monster bred out of irrationality: a religion of despair masquerading as one of hope. This remake is a stylistic variation on the earlier film which somehow reflects the spirits of our times. All the Christian elements were removed from it, a decision which defused all the philosophical content from the story and left it floating in the void, so to speak. Well, considering that this very de-christianization may be thought of as the necessary aftermath of an earlier crisis of which the earlier "Bad Lieutenant" precisely is an instance, the remake is both a natural outcome and a tautology. It is also a tautology in what regards its main actor's screen persona, evoking such similar predecessors as "Vampire's Kiss" and "Leaving Las Vegas". In a less intelectual apprehension, though, the film has something going for it, in terms of a certain ability to conjure up some humor from the situations it explores.

Rating: 53