Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans arrives with a title it never wanted, a director who claims ignorance of his predecessor, and a leading man performing at a pitch somewhere between jazz and seizure. A corrupt sergeant rescues a prisoner from rising floodwaters during Hurricane Katrina, wrecks his back, and floats through the next ninety minutes on Vicodin, cocaine, and whatever else wanders into the evidence room. The murder of a Senegalese family gives the plot its spine. There is gambling, blackmail, an iguana or two, and a great deal of shouting.

The cultural inventory here is thinner than a casual viewer might assume. The ensemble is refreshingly mixed, with Eva Mendes, Xzibit, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Fairuza Balk filling out a New Orleans crime drama the way such a drama would naturally be cast. Nobody pauses to explain anyone's identity. Mendes plays a prostitute and girlfriend, a role defined almost entirely by proximity to the protagonist, and the film never gestures toward a feminist reading of her circumstances. Race surfaces as texture, the murdered immigrants and the gang leader Big Fate, but Herzog declines to build a thesis from it. Katrina is weather and plot mechanics, not a climate parable. There are no LGBTQ characters, no body-positivity overtures, no accommodations for neurodivergence. McDonagh's hallucinations read as chemical ruin, not as a difference to be honored.

What remains is an amoral, observational piece of filmmaking that prowls and refuses to scold. The final scene in the aquarium, two men against a wall of fish and a question about dreams, offers no lesson and no redemption worth the name. This is a film about degradation that declines to lecture us about degradation. For a viewer braced for sermons, the silence is startling. The classification is straightforward: very low across the board, with only the incidental diversity of the cast and the ambient racial friction of the setting registering at all.