This is Nicolas Cage's movie. Plain and simple. The other actors all give fine performances, but Cage marvelously chews the scenery playing Terence McDonagh, an eccentric and corrupt police lieutenant in New Orleans. While the performance isn't quite as subtle to be in the list of all-time greats, I can still see it being probably nominated for an Oscar.

After Hurricane Katrina hits the city, Terence finds himself investigating a quintuple murder of immigrants. Terence definitely has a strange personality. At first, it seems he cares about finding who killed them. In one darkly funny scene, he confronts a witness' mother working in a nursing home with an old woman and he demands to know where her son is. When the mother doesn't talk, he deprives the old woman of her oxygen tube and continues to demand information. It's a particular scene that has to be seen to be believed, if you will.

Like the lieutenant in the 1992 film, Terence has a drug addiction. He gets speed and/or cocaine however possible and snorts it whenever possible. I actually haven't seen the other film, so I can't say how much the two characters are alike. I will say that although the other is rated NC-17 partly for sexual violence and strong sexual situations, Port of Call New Orleans is very pale compared to that. There's hardly any sex, implied or on screen. Director Werner Herzog also hasn't seen the other film, so if you have, you can compare all you like, but it probably just wasn't his intention for them to be compared.

Eventually, when the plot takes a turn, we learn (minor spoiler) Terence doesn't care about the murders. I guess he behaves weirdly no matter what's going on. Unfortunately, there's only so much depth to Terence that we don't know him to understand his behaviour. To make things a little more disappointing, the other characters are also stereotypes with no insight beyond what they do and how they talk on screen. Luckily, all the characters are believable from the acting with Cage, of course, as the standout.

If there's one thing I really don't understand, it's the shots of the lizards. They appear here and there, sometimes in extreme close-ups. I know they live in New Orleans, but they appear as if they're out of place, like a scene in a room with police officers. Whatever the symbolism is, it's lost on me, but it's fun to think about.

As you may have speculated from my review, Port of Call New Orleans has familiar crime elements to it: a murder investigation in the hood, interrogations with guys who are difficult get information from, stereotypical characters, druggies, etc. But thanks to Herzog's direction, Finkelstein's screenplay, and (I'm gonna hammer this in) Cage's performance, the film is interesting, occasionally funny, and not predictable as to where it's gonna go. The plot twist definitely helps.

The cinematography is fittingly bleak. The colour is toned down to match the world of sleaziness. Terence is another man who's a part of it, except he makes us laugh. There ain't much else we can do.

8/10

[May 6, 2010] Mea culpa. I realize now that the lizards (or just iguanas) are, in fact, hallucinations of Terence. Somehow, the scene where Stevie says to him that there aren't any iguanas on the table went over my head. I wasn't high, either.

[ View more in Movies & TV ][ View all News & Blogs ]