Salt Lake Tribune Review
How do you portray a man's grinding, unpleasant, unbearable life without making a grinding, unpleasant, unbearable movie?
It's possible, but only by either infusing the film with lots of humor or giving it more compassion for the characters than they have for themselves.
"Weather Man" doesn't do nearly enough of either.
Nicholas Cage plays David Spritz, a Chicago TV weatherman who keenly feels his own incompetence -- at his job, where he doesn't actually know anything about predicting the weather; with his kids, who at 12 and 15 are already smoking and getting into drugs; and with his father, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist (
Michael Caine) whose reputation seems impossible to live up to.
An inability to express emotion -- apparently hereditary -- doesn't help. So David and his family move slowly, dreamlike, through the frigid town, surrounded by lots of obvious metaphors for what's already obviously going on.
And that's about it. Things happen -- David gets a chance to work on a national show, his father becomes seriously ill, his relationship with his ex-wife (
Hope Davis) deteriorates -- but the story doesn't go anywhere. This is quite a departure for director
Gore Verbinski, whose previous outings include "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "The Ring." The plodding pacing and amateurish acting in "The Weather Man" could hardly be more different from those, and not in a good way. Cage is especially bad; without strong directing, he's a terrible actor. Caine just seems embarrassed.
I can't necessarily blame Verbinski for the script, so my complaints about that will go to Steven Conrad. Not only is it full of gratuitous, meaningless bad language (including at least three different derogatory terms for the female anatomy); it also incorporates some of the worst single lines of dialogue ever put on screen (my favorite: "It was a McDonald's hot apple pie. They weren't kidding. It was hot. ")
In its few moments of real comedy, "Weather Man" is funny. But those moments come as often as solar eclipses. Between them is nothing but blue-tinted, cold, depressing emotional wilderness.
The rundown: At the top of the world professionally, Chicago TV weatherman David Spritz is approaching disaster on a personal level as rapidly as the weather changes.
Synopsis: Popular Chicago TV weatherman David Spritz has a shot at the big time when Hello America, a national morning show, calls him for an audition. At the top of the world professionally, David is approaching disaster on a personal level as rapidly as the weather changes. His painful divorce, his dad's illness, and trouble with his kids have David poised on the knife's edge between stability and calamity. Trying to gain control of his situation, David slowly comes to realize that life, much like the weather, is completely unpredictable.
