Baby did a bad, bad thing: Lieutenant McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) during a reflective moment in the midst of his usual drinking, leching, and lying.

It’s difficult to enter into Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans expecting a comedy. That’s despite a title more ridiculous and unwieldy than even a CSI spin-off would accept, and a trailer that features star Nicolas Cage waxing rhapsodic on his lucky crack pipe, and instructing some henchmen to shoot a dead body again, because the victim’s “soul is still dancing.” This has to be meant for laughs, right? The lingering expectation of a gritty drama lies mostly in this film’s status as an ostensible remake of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult favorite, the Harvey Keitel tour-de-force Bad Lieutenant, and in Herzog’s reputation for dark and sober dramas about outsized obsessive personalities.

But Herzog has been dabbling in comedy for years now, from the silly mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness to his deadpan turn as “The German” in The Grand. That he’s finally directing a movie that plays for laughs isn’t as out of left field as it might seeam. Also, his Bad Lieutenant can’t properly be called a remake of Ferrara’s. It can barely be called a re-imagining, taking from its predecessor only the very general concept of a homicide lieutenant with a weakness for nearly every vice imaginable, seeking redemption as he looks to solve a heinous crime against innocents.