Post-credits scene: Bad Lieutenant

Greetings, and welcome to the first in a new series in which I'll be surveying the fallout from one of the weekend's major releases every Monday. Taking over from where You review left off, Post-credits scene will aim to take a more circumspect view of its celluloid subject matter, balancing critical perspective with social networking trends and box office data to build a bigger picture of how each film fared once the dust has settled.

We start with a strange one: Bad Lieutenant, Werner Herzog's quasi-remake of the 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a cop with a rotten core. Its star, Nicolas Cage, has been almost ubiquitous in the UK press in the run-up to the film's release, with the general consensus being that the oft-maligned actor has entered a rich period. And the film has picked up excellent reviews, despite its unorthodox origins, with critics so seduced by this genuinely beguiling mainstream thriller that they're not too bothered if it's a remake or not (for the record, Herzog claims that it isn't).

Here's a quick rifle through the critical picture. Our own Peter Bradshaw reckons the new Lieutenant is "less self-torturing, more farcical and crucially more ironic" than Ferrara's take, and praises both Cage and Herzog, who he says is probably the only director qualified to take this on. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times thinks Herzog and Cage are a marriage made in heaven: "[They] were born to work together. They are both made restless by caution." Tom Huddleston in Time Out muses quietly on what drugs the film's producers must have been on to convince them that Bad Lieutenant was fertile franchise material, yet concludes that the mix of European art-house adventurousness and brash Hollywood genre flick works remarkably well. Catherine Bray of Film 4 highlights the movie's gleeful, giggling "madness and humour", comparing it to Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, surely a high point for movies with narcotic-fuelled protagonists.

Check out rottentomatoes.com, that ever-faithful thermometer of critical opinion, and it's apparent that Herzog's version has, thus far, out-performed Ferrara's, with an 87% "fresh" rating to the earlier film's 75%. But Twitter-wise, I'm sorry to say that the movie has barely registered - and it's certainly not trending. My colleague Charles Gant, who has the inside line on these things, tweets that the movie will be at No 9 spot at the UK box office when this week's results are published, not a good result at all. To be fair, Bad Lieutenant also failed miserably at the US box office when it was released there a few months back, so producers will not be shocked.

So what happened, exactly? The new Bad Lieutenant is, for me, essential viewing, if only because, as Huddleston points out, it is such a bizarre concoction. Herzog has somehow mined gold from a most unlikely source, the art-house sequel, a seam that has previously given us such celluloid meisterwerks as American Psycho II and Donnie Darko follow-up S Darko. It is something remarkable to see, and Cage is on obscenely strong form, present in almost every frame of the film and thankfully so: his Terence McDonagh is so far off the rails that he has had to invent an entirely new form of hairbrained existence, chicaning through crisis and disaster like a slalom skier possessed by crack.

The only conclusion can be that the cinemagoing public did not believe what they were reading in the press, a salutary lesson for Hollywood studios who might be considering asking - say - Michael Haneke to direct a sequel to King of New York. No matter the result, the very idea of a sequel or remake to the original Bad Lieutenant is such a preposterous concept that people were just not willing to play ball. Nevertheless, I would not be surprised to see Herzog's film eventually picking up a decent, on-going audience on DVD. This one will surely receive excellent word-of-mouth, and it's likely the inevitable double-pack will still be a decent seller many, many years from now.