The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

With me being sick this week and stuck in the house I have been enabled to do nothing but watch movie after movie after movie. Although my fiancé Randy has spent most of his time this week at the school library studying and keeping as much distance from me as he could while I huff and puff a bad cough, a runny nose and a fever, he did sit down and enjoyed a movie here with me at home. Randy Herron is not only a senior majoring in Chemistry at OSU, but he and I have lived together for the last three years and is my main man when it comes to dissecting a movie. Within our long analyzing decisions about movies we’ve seen, I found Randy to be one of the most articulate and stubborn critics I know and love.


Randy and I appreciate the same movies and can identify a good movie form a bad one. As Randy says there is a slight difference in the tolerance level within different categories of movies. Since I am female I have a higher tolerance for chick flicks and romances, and because he’s a guy he has a higher tolerance for slow male centric. Randy tends to enjoy the genre of adventure, sci-fi and anything with good characters, “And those last two categories don’t often mix, Sci-fi kinda blows at having good characters”.


Having difficulty when asked what his Top five favorite movies where, Randy went to his extremely large movie collection and wrote down at least twenty of his favorites before we were able to narrow it down. I did the same, but much quicker. Mine are: Kill Bill, American Beauty, Amelie, Moulin Rouge, Death Becomes Her, I heart Huckabee, and Joe verses the Volcano. Ok, ok, so that’s My Top eight Favorite movies not five, but it’s just too impossible to narrow it down to only five. OMG, this is taking way too long, Randy is starting to search online, probably looking at his Facebook to see what he wrote down there.

So Randy’s Top nine favorite movies of all time are: Blade Runner, The Usual Suspects, Batman Begins, Fight Club, Memento, The Matrix, Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid, Garden State, and Leon the Professional. “Take note that my list of top favorite comedies would be totally different.”


So it was Randy’s turn to pick out a movie and he chose The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, a 2009 movie staring Nicolas Cage, an actor who I personally think resembles our interviewee quite a bit. He said he had picked it out after reviewing other people’s forums that had recommended other good movies Randy and I have watched in the past. He looks for these reconditions on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and First Showing. Not only was the movie reviewed well, it was said to be a much less traditional film noir crime movie, a topic of Randy’s interest.

From the beginning of the movie Randy liked that the characters weren’t of the traditional norm. Cage and Val Kilmer are clearly bad people. According to him, traditional movies usually have the viewers rooting for the good guy, unlike this movie where the main character wasn’t a good guy at all. Yet Randy remained interested in finding out what Cage’s goals were and what his motivation was to continue to do bad things a lieutenant. Opening scene he’s taking bets with Val Kilmer to see how long it would take a prisoner to drown. That was the part where I was like “Fuck! I hate this, I don’t like Cage as a bad, sick, and twisted cop”. Maybe it I partly because he looks like my Randy. I mean, we both agree that Nicolas Cage can definitely play the roll of a calm man and the roll of a crazy freaked out person very well, and we’ve seen him as a bad guy in Face-Off, but he was a funny likable bad guy, not a serious screwed up cop.

Top 3 favorite Nicolas Cage movies
Randy: Face-Off, The Rock, and Family Man
Carley: Raising Arizona, Face-Off, and City of Angels

Overall Randy enjoyed the movie. It had a good pace, and he didn’t know what was going to happen next, or what Cage was going to decide when it came to a moral dilemma. He usually doesn’t like it when plots are derived from drugged out characters where their intentions are only drug related, but it was done well in this movie. He like how the story kept introducing the idea a different point of view. There where these random close-up shots of lizards and alligators throughout the movie so it was unclear if we were viewing the world from Cage’s eyes, or what was actually going on in the moment.

Randy was fascinated with the ending of the movie where Cage was the last one of his family to make an improvement in his life. He felt that it finally was time for him to change morally and it was at this point in the movie where the irony strikes and Cage is saved from the one and only good thing he did at the beginning, save the drowning prisoner. Randy enjoyed the ending where Cage and his prisoner are just chillen at the aquarium watching the fish and laughing about life. He liked this ending better then if Cage were to ride off into the sunset.

Although Randy enjoyed the overall movie, he thought there were a couple of artificial situations that were unbelievable. For example, there is a scene where Cage and a police squad bust the drug dealing Xzibit. One minuet the room is filled with cops and then the cops all suddenly disperse. Who is left but Val Kilmer, Xzibit and Cage, and all Val Kilmer wants to do is convince Cage that they need to shoot Xzibit. A situation that could have taken place alone in a police car, but instead the writer wanted the mob of cops to conveniently walk away from the situation.

Randy believes that the use of Val Kilmer’s character could have been used better. He ended up being more evil than Cage, but in the end it just shows a contrast between him and Cage’s character who wasn’t entirely evil, but just an ass with fucked up morals and motivation. “Val Kilmer is like his evil couscous on his shoulder”. No one really address Val Kilmer in the movie, he just shows up when there’s an important decision to be made by Cage.