Hey, let's play that game we all spent most of our childhood doing where we're sexy outlaws on a mission of personal revenge.

So you're adrift in the society that turned its back on you. You can choose one ally to help you stay alive — a steel-plated tae kwon do-bot or a cop who plays by his own rules. Now, the tae kwon do-bot is impervious to pain and can kick the hearts out of five men per second, but I've already got that. Stick a rifle cabinet in its chest and now we're talking. Also you could break into places by using it like a Trojan horse that neighs like Stephen Hawking.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

But police have guns, too, and they have a power no robot can match: the one where they say "Hey, do what I tell you to do" and your only response is "OK, I will do what you want now." That power's so potent that we as citizens have like three different laws to protect us from it, but in the hands of a cop who doesn't care, like the "hero" of The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, there's almost no limit to what you can achieve.

For saving an inmate from a Katrina-flooded prison, New Orleans cop Nicholas Cage gets a promotion to lieutenant and a lingering back injury. The painkillers don't cut it, though — or maybe they cut it too well. Soon, he's turned to hard drugs.

That doesn't stop him from heading the investigation of the murder of a family of Senegalese immigrants. But his vices do stop it from being easy--and as Cage's manic threats, missing witnesses, and armed enemies add up, he may collapse along with his case.

Bad Lieutenant delivers what it promises: a lieutenant being very, very bad. Cage steals drugs from his own evidence room. Waives crimes in exchange for coke, sex, and favors for his bookie. He smokes and snorts so much stuff he'd probably invest in a robotic Gatling nose if he hadn't already gambled all his money away on football.

Forget pensions and appeals to service. You want kids to start signing up for the police force, you show them this movie.

We're all pretty familiar with how the downward spiral of drugs works. No matter how big your rock audience or crime empire, eventually the work suffers, and sooner or later you end up either in AA with a Bible in your back pocket or machine-gunned off the balcony of your Miami mansion. It's no surprise then that the higher Cage gets, the more the homicides slip off Bad Lieutenant's radar.

Director Werner Herzog keeps a firm hand on this chaotic till, skipping from scene to scene with a minimum of moralizing. He conjures up a number of memorable moments along the way, be they woozy closeups of iguanas or a coked-up Cage threatening to suffocate an old woman in the middle of her care facility.

As for Cage, in past films he's sometimes been about as subtle as Godzilla with a megaphone, but Herzog turns that to his advantage. Like its source, Bad Lieutenant is something of a sleazy B-movie, and Cage's druggie freakouts, pain-induced Nixonian posture, and bursts of depravity send the movie wobbling happily back and forth across the Camp-town city limits.

No surprise, then, it can end up feeling messy, off course and out of control. But Herzog drags it back together for a funny, strange and subversive resolution that seems to suggest "Hey, maybe the fix for heedlessly intoxicated police corruption is more cocaine-fueled cop violence."

After watching what Cage is capable of in Bad Lieutenant, I'm not about to argue with him.

Grade: B+