Werner Herzog, U. It also occasionally transcends those quotes. But art so fleetingly glimpsed only demonstrates how hard it is to make of low-rent trash something truly sublime. His presence here quickly called to mind The Island of Dr. Chronic pain ensues, which the now lieutenant fights with prescription meds and eventually hardcore drugs. Hobbled by back pain, he slumps and limps like a hunchback in ill-fitting suits, and works around a stiff neck like Peter Weller in RoboCop.
He stuffs an extra-long pistol into his belt, snorts coke from his thumb crotch like a hound, shucks and jives, and empties the Leaving Las Vegas bag of tricks to enact a full spectrum of strung out, baked, wasted, tweaked and barely breathing. And Herzog is happy to recede the film around him. Nicholson is one reference, but so is Jimmy Stewart, another actor who played around with variations on a presented self.
Their voices are always stubbornly their own, and thus their own persona is necessarily present, and at best collaborating, with the role in question. But if Cage is no impressionist, in Bad Lieutenant his distinctive deliveryโhomey, oddly genteel, buoyed, internally echoedโsounds distinctively like, well, Jimmy Stewart. In one scene of absurd burlesque, McDonagh trails a young couple outside a dance club and shakes them down for drugs.
Rather than apprehending them, he snorts their coke and fucks the apparently game girl at gunpoint while the hapless boyfriend watches. Cage, mid-fuck-thrust, swivels and fires his long pistol into the air and then near the boy. Outside of Kilmer, the rest of the cast plays it straight, letting Cage snort up the scenery.
Furthermore, Herzog largely approaches the film as a standard noir-accented policier. His shooting style is mostly unadorned and direct, but often taken at a lower angle, so that standing figures hover slightly and seated figures seem in solidarity with the ground. His New Orleans is a series of seedy, lived-in spaces and sordid backgrounds.
