Woe to the pharmacist who keeps McDonagh waiting for a prescription. Pity the elderly woman on a respirator who dares obstruct his investigation. (He’s got a thunderbolt of conservative talk-radio fury for her.) And shame on us for letting this nutty performance draw us so close.
Under Werner Herzog’s direction, the days spent in McDonagh’s company are steadily, comically harrowing. He’s trying to solve the murders of a house full of dead Senegalese. He has to deal with his alcoholic father (Tom Bower) and his father’s quasi-alcoholic girlfriend (Jennifer Coolidge). There’s money to lose on college football games, an assortment of narcotic cocktails to snort and smoke, and seedy johns to chase away from his luscious hooker girlfriend (Eva Mendes, sharper than she’s ever been).
As time passes, McDonagh’s delirious insobriety exposes the worst in his humanity but the best in both Cage and Herzog. Their pairing is about as perfect a meeting between a director’s sense of mischief and an actor’s license to misbehave as a moviegoer could hope for. And it’s perfect that they’ve teamed up for a movie about a deviant cop. They’ve built their careers out of breaking laws.
The landmarks in Herzog’s work - among them, “Aguirre: Wrath of God’’ and “Fitzcarraldo’’ - amount to a muscular consideration of man’s limits in the scheme of nature’s awesome limitlessness. The men either went crazy or were crazy to start with. Sometimes that man was Herzog himself. Crazy, of course, is what Cage does more robustly than anyone else. He’s an ideal successor to the actor Klaus Kinski, whose pathological relationship with Herzog brought out wonderful things in both of them.
