The Weather Man
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Rated: R
Website: http://www.weathermanmovie.com/
Release Date: 2005-11-04
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Gemmenne de la Peña, Nicholas Hoult
Director: Gore Verbinski
Screenwriter: Steve Conrad
WorkNameSort: Weather Man, The
Our Rating: 2.00
Scuttling his reputation for liveliness, Gore Verbinksi (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring) proves that following a fictional TV weatherman around a secondary market can be as dull as the real thing. That’s Chicagoan David Spritz (Nicolas Cage), who stumbles through a failing marriage and parenting hassles while mulling a possible relocation to a career-making gig in New York. It may be possible to elicit sympathy for a character who’s trying to choose between his $240K job and one that pays $1.2 mil, but David remains too successful to be relatable yet not “important” enough to be interesting. As his dad, Michael Caine endows an already dour movie with its Debbie Downer, periodically intruding on the proceedings to tsk-tsk everybody else’s behavior and remind us that he has cancer. The few semi-rousing interludes like a funny internal monologue David delivers while trying to remember to pick up some tartar sauce belong in a different movie altogether.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.