Of all the films one never expected to see remade, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant – a pitch black portrait of a corrupt policeman being sucked into the hell of his multiple addictions, in which a mumbling, masturbating Harvey Keitel gave a performance somewhere between extreme method acting and primal therapy – would rank pretty high.

Curiously, none of those involved with the new film are prepared even to acknowledge that it is a remake, and certainly none of the interviews included as extras here suggest that they want to admit the original ever existed. Ferrara’s typically measured response to this cinematic mugging was reportedly to say that everyone involved “should burn in hell”.

It was certainly another huge surprise to see Werner Herzog’s name attached to this “re-imagin­ing” of Ferrara’s 1992 original, and aside from the odd – very odd – foray into iguana hallucinations and alligator POV shots there’s not much here to alert the viewer that the director of Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo is at the directorial helm. It’s far more Nicholas Cage’s film; his cop on crack certainly owns the screen, towering over everyone else like a deranged and drug-addled Jimmy Stewart. Our anti-hero is here transported from the mean streets of New York to those of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; hints of a Biblical flood?

In the film’s prologue, this only averagely bad policeman rescues a prisoner from the rising floodwaters in a local jail; the result is a promotion to lieutenant and an aggravation of his back problem that leads him from an Elvis-like over-indulgence in ‘prescribed’ drugs into a yawning gulf of coke, heroin and crack addiction.

As intense as Cage’s performance is, it comes to feel increasingly mannered as the film (rather than he, oddly) seems to lose its grip; what should have been a terri­fyingly sweaty sense of things spiralling more and more out of control just feels like a run of bad luck, and the threat of the self simply imploding under the sheer weight of abuse, one that hovers closer and closer about Harvey Keitel in Ferrara’s film, is largely absent. Herzog’s movie is even funny at times, a black comedy rather than a picture of a soul in torment. Unlike the fiercely Catholic original – with a raped nun at its centre – this tale of murdered African drug pushers seems at first to have no religious text or subtext in mind; it’s only when you realise that the watery motifs announced at the film’s beginn­ing flow through to its conclus­ion in a number of ways that the notion that this is a movie about salv­ation rather than atonement suggests itself; but if Cage’s initial plunge into the filthy waters left by Katrina are a sort of baptism, then we know, from the very start, that he is both saved and forgiven; it’s just that he doesn’t. From that perspective, the curiously serendipitous workings of the film’s plot – and the fact that we never feel Cage’s soul (just his goldfish brain) is as at stake in the way that Keitel’s was – makes a lot of sense, even if it robs Herzog’s movie of much of the original’s gruelling power. It’s an undeniably entertaining film, but its constant shifts of tone and uneven pacing work against it ever becoming a satisfying one; and it’s certainly not, like the original, a recklessly brave piece of extreme cinema.