Badge Film Blog

Is Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant remake a comedy?

The first trailer for a new take on Abel Ferrara's disturbing tale of a dysfunctional cop, featuring Nicolas Cage in the Harvey Keitel role, has hit the web. Should we be laughing?

Most people would agree that Abel Ferrara's grimy crime drama Bad Lieutenant makes for a pretty uncomfortable viewing experience. Harvey Keitel's morally ungrounded cop spends most of the film comprehensively destroying his own humanity. And then there's that seriously iffy masturbation scene in front of the schoolgirls.

  1. Bad Lieutenant
  2. Production year: 1991
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 90 mins
  6. Directors: Abel Ferrara
  7. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo
  8. More on this film

I have a feeling, however, that the forthcoming quasi-remake, starring Nicolas Cage in the Keitel role, with - I kid you not - Werner Herzog in the director's chair, has the potential to create mass viewer unease in a rather different manner. Ferrara himself has made no bones about his views on the matter: "They should all die in hell," he told last year. ""It's like when you get robbed. It's just a horrible feeling and I don't understand why they would do it."

The new Bad Lieutenant, the first promo for which is above, is reportedly not a direct remake - the Cage character has an Irish name, where his unnamed forebear was Italian-American, for a start, and the title is ... ahem ... Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, with the events relocated from New York to the Big Easy.

Furthermore, Herzog claims to have never seen the original film and to have never heard of Abel Ferrara, although one suspects this might be playfulness on the part of the famously sardonic German.

"No, it's not a remake," Herzog told last year. "You have to delete that from your memory, though we may not be able to delete it from public perception.

"It's like I keep saying, 'A James Bond film, the newest one, is not a remake of the previous one; it's a completely different story.' It only has a corrupt policeman as the central character and that's about it."

Finally, if the trailer is anything to go by, there is one more vital shift from original to reimagining. Herzog's version, which costars Val Kilmer and Eva Mendes, would appear to be a whimsical black comedy. At least, Cage's farcical overacting made me laugh.

Surely the original was so brilliantly harrowing because Ferrara, and Keitel, refused point blank to allow the Bad Lieutenant's downward spiral to descend into farce? Cage and Herzog, meanwhile, seem to have embraced the comedic possibilities of a life lived on the edge, and without boundaries.

I have to confess, I'm a bit bamboozled here. Why would the actor and director take on this project, if only to produce something so utterly out of step with the excellent original? What do you reckon to this one? Is it possible they only decided it should be a comedy in retrospect, like one of those YouTube trailer do-overs in which a famous film is reimagined in a different genre? Because that's exactly what this promo looks like.

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