tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

It's been a long time since a movie has left me as speechless as after I watched Werner Herzog's latest mess of a film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans.  Leaving the theatre, I really, honestly, didn't have a thing to say about it.  I'm not sure that's changed.

Nicolas Cage plays a mildly crooked cop who goes from bad to worse when his back is permanently injured while doing a good a deed.  The injury leads to an addiction to pain killers, which leads to coke, accidentally snorting heroin, falling deeper into a co-dependant relationship with his hooker girlfriend and fellow drug user Frankie (Eva Mendes), and engaging in more and more illegal acts.  These include robbing Frankie's clients, selling police information to drug dealers, robbing and raping young adults when he believes they have drugs he can take from them in the name of the law.  And he frequently hallucinates aggressive iguanas.

A South African newspaper’s heading read “he won the election, now can he lead a country?” This unhopeful question is referring to Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman), who in 1994 was elected the first black President of an apartheid stricken South Africa. After emerging 27 years from prison for political upheaval, Mr. Mandela had no inclinations to seek revenge on the white Afrikaners who placed the cuffs on him. Instead he disarms any such thought, and the film, entitled Invictus after an 1875 poem by British writer William Earnest Henley, is attracted to the passive stance which had, at its focal point, the sport of ruby.

Rugby is a primitive sport that glorifies brutality. A character in the film refers to it as a hooligans’ game. A bunch of ferocious men never hesitate to jolt another’s anatomy, leaving the victim writhing in pain on a field of grass that resembles man’s outer state; dirty, muddy, torn and worn. Each team interlocks with the other trying to move the opposition out of place so one team can snatch the ball up and progress it up-field. Despite the over-populated yelling crowd and the groans of the rugby players when their flesh smacks one another, communication is still tried amongst each team with hop of keeping order amongst each other. This does not sound so much like sport. Rather, it has characteristics that resemble wars, battles and even apartheids (split teams). 

Imagine that!  Roland Emmerich did another epic end-of-the-world flick, starring semi-respectable actors, and boasting a huge budget!  Doesn't this schtick get old Mr. Emmerich?

2012 features a paper thin plot about crazy solar flares in the few years leading up to the year 2012 that somehow turn the neutrinos in the Earth's core into microwaves that slowly, but steadily start heating up the planet.  This results in earthquakes, tsunamis, sink-holes and other natural disasters.  It's all pretty dehumanized until these things start to affect Jackson (John Cusack) and Kate (Amanda Peet), a divorced couple with two kids.  Oh, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a bleeding heart, government geologist who advises the president (Danny Glover) on all this, and eventually (spoiler alert!) gets with the president's wicked hot daughter (Thandie Newton) to replenish the Earth's population.  There's a Woody Harrelson part there too.  He plays the crazy guy that predicted all this.