I can’t help but feel that, given the right circumstances, even the most sophisticated among us can devolve into reality-show contestants. When it was reported that Werner Herzog was making a movie based on Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), the latter basically said, “Oh no you di’-in’t,” and the former retorted, “I ain’t here to make friends.” The new film, christened The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans, shouldn’t have borrowed its predecessor’s title at all. It isn’t a sequel, a remake, or an homage. Nic Cage plays a bad lieutenant, all right, but not bad enough to boogie before us like his antecedent, Harvey Keitel, did—in the raw.

More than the wardrobe has been changed. The ’92 version was cold but smoldering; it was a classic unintentional comedy long before coked-up Keitel bellowed “You rat fuck!” to a wraithlike vision of Christ (although the film has nothing on a more recent addition to the genre, The Wicker Man—starring Nicolas Cage). Herzog’s tone is entirely different. Once, when asked why other directors have cast him in comic bit parts, he said, “I have a peculiar humor that becomes a cross that I bear. … I’m pretty good at it, as long as I can be someone who’s vile, base, intimidating, and dysfunctional.” Herzog does not appear in this movie, but his sense of humor costars with Cage, and their chemistry together is marvelous. The new Bad Lieutenant truly is vile, base, intimidating, and hilarious.

Transposed from New York to Louisiana, this crooked cop (who has a name this time around—and a dorky one, at that: Terrence McDonagh) isn’t investigating the rape of a nun; he’s charged with defending a teenager (the auspiciously named Denzel Whitaker) who witnessed a spree of brutal murders to which a drug kingpin (rapper-cum-actor Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner) is suspiciously connected. Unchanged, however, is the policeman’s alpha-male baditude. He’s the biggest bungler since Inspector Clouseau, but Peter Sellers didn’t date a high-class hooker with a habit (Eva Mendes); offer his services as an inside man to criminals; blackmail drug-running ravers and bang their babes; fix college football games; rack up tens of thousands of dollars of gambling debt; threaten women at a nursing home; or stuff his nostrils with heroin and cocaine—sometimes mistaking one for the other and then taking the other to put him in the right mood for going to the office. Not even Keitel did all that. Slouched over and coiffed so that his hair is like a loose wig, Cage does—and he’s as tweakily undead as he was in Vampire’s Kiss. One doesn’t expect any semblance of realism from Cage’s performances, and certainly not any sanity; but if a role calls for him to be vile, base, intimidating, and dysfunctional, he’s perfectly game.

Written by William A. Finkelstein, whose résumé includes NYPD Blue, L.A. Law, and Cop Rock (!!!!!!!!), Bad Lieutenant could almost be a parody of police procedurals—or it could be a police-procedural script that Herzog and Cage then parodied. Aside from a sadistic fellow detective, Pruit (Val Kilmer), McDonagh’s station house is a roomful of cliché-mouthing blanks; they might as well be shooting blanks, too. But parody doesn’t quite cover it. With its anomic hero, Herzog’s Rescue Dawn may have been a parodic spin on patriotic P.O.W. stories, but it was like an unfunny in-joke that the audience was outside of. Herzog is too singular and trippy a talent for straight-up satire; perhaps this partly explains a fabulous fish-eyed shot of a gator surveying the highway patrol at a crime scene, and then, deeming it unworthy of his time, slinking back into the bog.

The tone is subtle without being low-key; analyzing it too much might end up destructive. It suffices to say that the movie isn’t offensive. I’d be dishonest—or goody-goody at the very least—if I claimed that the cruelty and envelope-pushing didn’t enamor me. But Bad Lieutenant isn’t so much a swipe at any particular mode of corruption as it is at the chaotic universe Herzog declaimed about in Grizzly Man. In that film and Rescue Dawn, as well as Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and even his remake of Nosferatu, nature intrudes on civilization or vice versa. Like his roadside reptilian snoop, Herzog acts as a metaphysical border guard, always trying to suss out exactly where the moral threshold lies without (except, abstrusely, in Grizzly Man) crossing the boundary into moralism. We’re informed early on that this is a post-Katrina bayou, and the movie must begin immediately after the hurricane because we see a prisoner floating to the top of his cell before McDonagh (in a rare act of kindness) rescues him. Talking about the film, Herzog speaks of “public morality”—but that phrase is skidding on more metaphysical muck than Fitzcarraldo’s mountaineering steamship. I wouldn’t call the filmmakers’ use of this setting exploitative, but the link between McDonagh’s behavior and the broken levees (the tragedy was as much a failure of humankind as it was a ravage of nature) seems too vague. Since we don’t see him or the snarling Officer Pruit before Katrina, or witness them change very much during the movie, we can’t really compare their pre-storm conduct—or pre-storm public morality in general—with its present condition, even if it’s evident that that was the filmmakers’ intention. What remains is a broader thread about how the police function, and how police work functions on police officers; it’s like joking about a nightmare to alleviate the dream’s sting. Is McDonagh a bad lieutenant? Is he a bad man? What is the efficacy of being bad? The movie raises these questions, and then questions its own conclusions. There are, after all, various definitions of “bad.” The film might be gaudy, but it’s as snappy as that alligator’s jaw; it even has a Taxi Driver dénouement.

But this setting does give Herzog something he couldn’t get from New York—a swampy atmosphere. Unlike Blanche Dubois, this New Orleans doesn’t rely on the kindness of strangers; the movie’s dreamlike absurdity is like a whiff of Southern Gothic blown by a belle’s withered fan. What better literary context is there for McDonagh’s family—a drunkard dad (Tom Bower) and his drunker wife, Genevieve (Jennifer Coolidge—a Christopher Guest star)? A globby princess with bubblegum brains in her more strictly comic roles, the ever-delightful Coolidge brings the right presence to McDonagh’s step-mama. Genevieve’s very name is antebellum politesse gone to seed. As the whorish houseguest Genevieve quarrels with, Mendes is charmingly vapid; her Frankie’s hooker boots have hidden cleats. She’s wry enough to give McDonagh a dirty look for bringing the witness he’s protecting to a Biloxi casino, but too self-involved to recognize plot eccentricities that don’t stymie her fun. Unlike Ferarra’s claustrophobic Big Apple, Herzog’s New Orleans is made fluid by a network of supporting roles. Brad Dourif is ideal as a whiney, put-upon bookie; Shea Whigham turns “Whoa” into a mantra; and Joiner is a competent patsy for Cage. He’s slimy but practical; he could’ve been a Corleone functionary. But he’s capable of being menacing and still showing fear—what’s scarier than Cage dangling a Magnum in your face? (He really is a national treasure.) In some scenes, the balance of power between these two is funny and frightful all at once—Capaldi and Gandolfini in In the Loop, Dano and Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Xzibit and Cage in Grand Theft Auto: Machete Gras.

The movie isn’t entirely successful. Seeing the characters’ lives and the city before the storm could’ve trespassed on Benjamin Button sentimentality—and in the Deep South, trespassers get shot. It might have also imperiled the fragile tone. However, an extra helping of backstory wouldn’t have disrupted this gumbo’s flavor. A contrast between psychopathic Pruit and sociopathic McDonagh could have also added some spice; but the eponymous lieutenant’s counterpoint is cast off in the middle, and suddenly reeled back in for the end—an opaque bully to the last. And, although it’s an adequate laugh line, McDonagh’s final state of mind isn’t quite accounted for. Is he a weak, remorseful man—aware now of a broken, random system? Or is he static, uncaring, and dead inside—a functional cog in a dysfunctional machine? He asks if fish can dream. Is that what the flood has turned him into? Perhaps I don’t want to know the answer. But for all the filmmakers’ equivocations about the consequences of Katrina, Herzog leaves us with an apt parting image: Cage, at an aquarium, with his head underwater.