Eh. Starts off fairly well, then gets pretty lame. It's a great vehicle for Nick Cage to do his typically funny madman-exasperation bit, and that's all well and good for the first twenty minutes, but then the story stops being funny and gets wholly sentimental. In addition, it gets just odd, implausible, and strangely dark a few times.
There's a weird and distracting joke introduced early. Nick Cage's daughter realizes that he's not her father. Rather than *lie* to this little 4-year-old cutie and reassure her that he *is* her Dad, Nick Cage confesses, gleefully, that he is not. Odd. The daughter then says that Nick Cage is an alien of some sort, and wonders when he will return to the "mothership." This joke is repeated throughout the movie.
Not funny. It's a writerly sort of gag. It's the sort of joke that it is instantly recognizable as a joke on *paper,* but which isn't nearly as funny as the stuff that doesn't read as obvious "jokes" on paper but which are actually much funnier when peformed. Like Nick Cage's madman routine.
Ah, well. It's not terrible. A big mistake, I think, is that the angel (I guess he's an angel, at least) who transforms Cage's life -- Don Cheadle -- is only in the film in the very beginning and at the very end. That means that Cage can't complain to anyone about his odd predicament, as no one else in the film understands he's in an odd predicament at all. And complaining is funny.
C. Maybe a C+. You get to see "Tea Leoni" naked through the pebbled glass of a shower door, but you can't see much except vague outlines, and it's almost certainly not Tea Leoni anyway.
The ending is sort of strange, too.
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
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Not that it matters much, because the film had lost me well before the ending, but the ending is just unsatisfying a bit strange.
So, you know the premise: Nick Cage is a bachelor King of the World, but he's put into an alternate universe where he became an everyday schlub-- but an everyday schlub with a loving wife and two cute children.
Fine. So the end of the movie comes... and he goes back to the "real world," and he becomes the bachelor again. But he pines for the other life, so he seeks out Tea Leoni in order to raise a family with her.
All well and good. But that means his two alternate-universe children have been written out of existance.
Is this a big problem? I guess not; the whole film is a big fantasy. But still, it's a little strange that Hollywood chooses to erase the two kids out of existance at the end of the film. Do they count as deaths? I dunno. Sure, the suggestion is that Nick Cage and Tea Leoni will *now* have the same kids, but of course they won't; if your kid dies, you can have another kid, but he won't be the *same* kid.
Really, the whole film was pretty poorly conceived.
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