If you’re not a big fan of the Christmas season or if December 25 is simply bearing down on you too fast, check out Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans, the new Werner Herzog film starring Nicholas Cage. The film’s bleached-out colors (it’s more “in gray” than “in color”), along with Cage’s damn-near demented performance as a variously addicted cop, contains not the least whiff of holiday cheer. The movie is funny—very funny—but in a way that will appeal more to your inner Beelzebub than to your Tiny Tim.
The new film is a sort of remake Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant. I say “sort of” because Herzog and screenwriter William Finkelstein took Ferrara’s title and his basic concept of the addicted cop, and jettisoned the rest. (Herzog has even claimed that he never saw the original.) When it comes to trans-Atlantic remakes, it’s usually the American filmmakers who dumb down a properly weighty European original. But Herzog has reversed the process. Except that he hasn’t so dumbed the original down as much as he’s lightened it up and set it free.
Ferrara’s (and Harvey Keitel’s) Bad Lieutenant was ultimately a lost soul who was trying to sin so hard that he would get God’s attention, and the film became an extremely Catholic tale of redemption. But Herzog has dropped the religious quest and simply set Nicholas Cage free, gloriously free, with the material.
Cage responds with the greatest cinematic high wire act since Phillip Petit walked that cable between the Twin Towers in Man on Wire. His character “develops” by becoming more outrageous in the ways he abuses drugs and also people—even nice old ladies—when he’s trying to get them to talk.
As the story plays out, you see that Cage’s lieutenant hasn’t really lost his moral bearings as completely as he seemed to. That’s well and good, but the film’s whiff of moral uplift isn’t what I took away. Instead I remember the iguanas that Cage’s character (but no one else) sees in his hallucinations. (They look very real, and when Cage slaps one you hear the thump.) And the shot of an apparently grieving alligator who seems to have just lost his or her mate when a car ran over it. Herzog actually gives us a shot from the alligator’s perspective and somehow renders the fearsome critter kinda human.
The pleasure, and perhaps even the greatness of the film lies in the freedom that both Herzog and Cage grant themselves. They both “go wild.” But both of them frame and master their daring: Herzog within the restraints of genre film, which he honors, and Cage within the discipline that he ultimately applies to his performance. He does all kinds of tricks out there on the high wire, but never falls off.
I loved Bad Lieutenant, but thinking about it is a little depressing as well. There is so little inspired movie making these days that this film feels like a revelation. When did it become so rare for the movies to show real daring and imagination?
Movie Review
Action-packed Kraven the Hunter showcases gritty Marvel antihero
One of the oddest things about the blockbuster era we live in is that while Disney owns the rights to the majority of Marvel comic book characters, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man and any affiliated characters. Since they’re sharing Spider-Man himself with Disney, Sony has been trying to capitalize on those rights by making stand-alone films using niche characters that only comic book fanatics would know.
Having exhausted Venom and whiffed on attempts with Morbius and Madame Web, they’re trying again with Kraven the Hunter. Also known as Sergei Kravinoff, Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a self-styled vigilante who, as the film tells it, travels the world exacting vengeance on the truly bad people of the world. He’s the son of Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a hard-edged Russian oligarch, and brother to Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who is relatively weak compared to the rest of his family.
The origin story has Kraven gaining his animal-like powers - including super-strength, speed, and jumping abilities - as a teenager from a mysterious serum given to him by a girl named Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) after he was mauled by a lion. The two maintain a tenuous partnership as adults, with Calypso helping him hunt down other villains like Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).
Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film looks and feels enormously lazy, something made merely to hold on to potentially valuable intellectual property. Other than the tense family dynamic between the Kravinovs, little makes sense in the story. Kraven has an indecipherable moral code that has him going after poachers - because he’s part lion? - in addition to other high-powered criminals, with no clear goal except to … get back at his father?
The laziness extends to the action scenes, which feature Kraven being mostly impervious to any damage, whether it’s hand-to-hand combat, knives, or guns. The CGI-heavy scenes don’t even allow moviegoers to enjoy an R-rated bloody free-for-all, as all of the blood splatter is computer-generated, too. Since apparently one Spider-Man villain is not enough, three others make appearances with abilities that are under-explained and CGI that is poorly done.
That’s not even counting Calypso, another Spider-Man villain whose purpose in this film is nebulous at best. Her early connection with Kraven is so coincidental as to be laughable, and her continued reasons for helping him as an adult strain credulity as well. The only saving grace of her presence is that the filmmakers don’t try to shoehorn romance into the plot; perhaps they’re saving that for the (inevitable?) sequel.
Taylor-Johnson has had one of the most prolific-yet-anonymous careers in modern Hollywood, with appearances in big films like The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, and Tenet that have made very little impact. Even as the star here, he fails to hold your attention, with the story and visuals doing him no favors. DeBose has followed up her Oscar win for West Side Story with schlock like I.S.S., Argylle, and this, which doesn’t bode well for her career. At least Crowe gets to chew the scenery.
With a contractual inability to mention the name “Spider-Man,” movies like Kraven the Hunter exist in a weird area that forces filmmakers to make up stories for characters to which most people have no attachment. And just like Sony’s previous efforts, it is a very poor way to spend two hours in a movie theater; avoid at all costs.
---
Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.
