Werner Herzog's 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans' arrives bug-eyed and maniacal in cinemas this weekend, and with it comes - what critics have hailed - a return-to-form performance from Nicolas Cage.

Cage plays Terence McDonagh a drug addled, gambling addict detective in post-hurricane New Orleans, and he does so with relish. When the news was announced that Herzog, director of such classics as 'Fitzcarraldo' and 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God', was teaming up with Cage on this pseudo-sequel/remake of the infamous Abel Ferrera movie 'Bad Lieutenant' (1992), there was a sense of 'What?' and 'Why?' It turns out that the two of them, Cage and Herzog, were on to a winner, creating something crazy, demented and very entertaining. I remember eavesdropping on critics at the London Film Festival last October who were raving about the movie, not for any artistic merits, but just because it's great fun and Cage gives a fittingly ludicrous performance.

Of course, Cage is known for his wild intensity and off-beat decisions as an actor, and this has led to a extraordinarily peculiar career. Of late it has hit a nadir, each new movie he made seemed to be worse than the last, reaching - for me - a low around the time of 'Ghost Rider'. But, recently, there was the sense that he was on the verge of a comeback, and, for me at least, it really began early 2009 with the release of Alex Proyas' 'Knowing'.

'Knowing' was advertised in the vein of all those 'twisty' numbers thrillers mixed in with a spooky-child movie, akin to 'The Number 23' meets 'The Ring', but fortunately what was on screen was a different beast that alienated (pardon the pun) many critics. What we wound up getting was something close to an episode of 'The Outer Limits' that took its numbers concept and kept pushing it further and further towards something far beyond the scale of its relatively low budget, until it wound up as a pure piece of fantasy sci-fi come the film's down-beat climax. It's the best film Proyas had made since 1998's 'Dark City' and the first time Cage had managed to deliver a good performance - bar a few ropey bits of acting at times - since 'World Trade Centre' in 2006, but that wasn't exactly him at his best.

The best of Cage was an impressive run of varying shades of peculiar starting with the Coen Brother's magnificent screwball comedy 'Raising Arizona', where Cage played H.I. McDunnough a career criminal who falls in love with his arresting officer, once happily married they discover she's unable to have children and they go about trying to baby-nap one of their own. He followed this with the likes of eating live cockroaches in 'Vampire's Kiss', working with David Lynch on 'Wild At Heart', a string of so-so comedies that boosted his profile before bagging himself an Oscar for his absolutely heart-breaking portrayl of man determined to drink himself to death in Mike Figgis' masterful 'Leaving Las Vegas'.

It was here Cage took a left turn and post-awards glory made his first movie with uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer; the film was 1996's 'The Rock' and it made up the first of an unofficial trilogy of brilliant action films alongside the following year's 'Con Air' and 'Face/Off'. Now, as a bona fide box office star, Cage had carte-blance and dabbled in a few poorly picked projects; Wim Wenders art-house flick turned romantic drama remake 'City of Angels', Brian DePalma thriller 'Snake Eyes' worth watching for the first 20 minutes only, Joel Schumacher's appallingly directed '8mm' hashed out from a allegedly heavily altered script by 'Seven' writer Andrew Kevin Walker. He worked with the likes of Scorcese on the muddled 'Bringing Out The Dead', and his re-teaming with Bruckheimer led to the surprisingly dull 'Gone In Sixty Seconds'. But performances and projects never coalesced into something entertaining, this was made apparent thanks to a truly baffling Italian accent in the high profile adaptation of 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' in 2001.

The last - until now - truly phenomenal Cage performance came when he piled on the pounds and applied some restraint playing the heavily neurotic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his - fictional - twin brother Donald in Spike Jonze's 'Adaptation'. Alas, this was not the start of a resurgence in Cage's career performance wise, but his next project the Bruckheimer produced 'National Treasure' successfully capitalised on the growing 'The Da Vinci Code' vibe two years before Tom Hanks got a chance. Three years later he reprised the blockbusting role and there's a third 'National Treasure' film in the works, but these harmless romps were nothing compared to the abysmal likes of 'Next' (one of the worst twist endings ever), 'Ghost Rider', 'Bangkok Dangerous' and, most infamously, 'The Wicker Man' remake, a film that has now generated a cult following for being hilariously awful.

Now, with his performance in 'Bad Lieutenant' and, earlier this year, 'Kick Ass' it almost seems like Cage has got his groove back, but, lest we forget, he's in another Bruckheimer family-friendly blockbuster this summer called 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and he re-unites with 'Gone in Sixty Seconds' director Dominic Sena on Medieval yarn 'The Season of the Witch'.

If anything, Cage remains watchable at least, if only to see what curious quirk he'll stuff into a bad performance (drinking jelly beans from a martini glass and laughing at nature documentaries in 'Ghost Rider' for example), and you never know when he'll suddenly do a 180 and deliver something wonderful again. If anything, this uncertainty is far more interesting than an actor happy to cruise on auto-pilot, right?