1/5 A Revolting NORP Regurgitation
  by Robert Buchanan (Wisconsin)
Here, ultrahack Brett Ratner and the profoundly untalented screenwriting duo of David Diamond and David Weissman perform an inexplicable and boring magic trick by stretching a well-worn scenario that could barely suffice as a half-hour television show into the longest two hours and six minutes in the history of motion pictures. I often check the time counter of my DVD player once, maybe twice when viewing a movie; while watching this slogging, entirely uninspired dreck, I checked it over a dozen times, always bewildered by how little time had actually elapsed.

Nicolas Cage plays a successful Wall Street broker with no social life and, like every other character of this rancid story, nary a whit of personality, either. With the aid of sassy, magical, pistol-wielding Don Cheadle, he's transported to an alternate dimension in which he sells tires and is blessed with a loving family...the life he could have had if he hadn't gotten on THAT PLANE thirteen years ago! Christ, what a pristine concept! It's the life he could have had, but he doesn't realize how much better it is to have a family than an nine-figure bank account and investment assets out the wazoo until he experiences a succession of charmless, totally predictable incidents in the life of a godforsaken Jersey NORP.

This story's conflict of choice is utterly beyond me; why does Cage want to move back to NYC and start his career over with his surprise brood when he lives in a gigantic house beyond the means of all but the most prosperous middle-class families (it's cute when production designers who live in ivory towers try to depict the working-class household) and could simply quit his job and use what he knows to engage in insider trading without ever being caught? The performances are bland at best (Cage, Téa Leoni) and infuriating at worst: as always, Jeremy Piven is enragingly obnoxious, so annoying in his overacting that I'd thrill to see him thrown into rush hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Saddled with yet more ugly, blue-tinted photography, Ratner's direction would be rote if it weren't so calculatedly, pointlessly drawn - there's no depth here to convey; he's just dragging every scene out as long as he possibly can to satisfy studio expectations of a two-hour feature.

If you want to see almost everything that's wrong with American cinema, Ratner's filmography and this flavorless entry in particular are endemic of it. This is gutless, brainless, wholly derivative film making. It's bound to insult the intelligence of any viewer with a triple-digit IQ who makes the mistake of watching it. Consider yourself warned.

Incredible - Universal barely graced "Dune" with an adequate DVD edition the first time around, but this garbage was treated to all the trimmings. There are nine deleted scenes (as if this wasn't already three-fourths too long), a featurette that's probably handy if you're out of NyQuil and three (THREE, HOLY CHRIST) commentary tracks: one by Ratner, Diamond and Weissman that surely sounds like a great sucking noise, another from producer Marc Abraham that's about as fascinating as tax code literature and one more in which Danny Elfman discusses the movie's insipid, sleigh bell-tinged score, probably the worst he's ever composed. So Elfman couldn't have voiced a commentary track for "Beetlejuice" or "Batman?" He had to discuss a score that sounds as though he wrote it on a napkin or three during a conversation? If all this doesn't put you to sleep...there's also a Seal music video on this disc. Zzzzzz.

4/5 A new approach to the trading places theme
  by Jim Gateley (Sunnyvale, CA)
4 of 5 stars for the romance movie The Family Man. This is a variation on the trading places theme. Rich, high-power Wall Street business man (Nicolas Cage) runs into a street character (Don Cheadle) who causes Cage's character to have lived a different path in his life. Cage awakens to find a wife and kids where he was single before. The wife turns out to be an old girlfriend; so this is the life-path where he marries her. Hard to know if it was all a dream or not. No real explaination of how he got moved into this alternate life-path nor how he eventually returned to his original path. No explaination of Cheadle's "powers" or role in all of this.

Nice relationship between Cage and his girlfriend/wife (Tea Leoni). Very believeable as a married couple with kids. A nicely made movie, good story, novel approach to the trading places theme. It is a fun and sweet movie worth watching.

5/5 A Great Funny Story, better than Dick and Jane
  by Michael R. Diroma (Meridian, id United States)
I you like either character you'll love this little life's changes story with a bit of magic thrown in to move the people around a little. Some very memberal characters added, make it a great all year round holiday movie

5/5 I have a confession to make
  by Daniel Hayes
My fiance and I snuck into this movie. We had certificates for Jim Carrey's "How The Grinch Stole Christmas", but we weren't in the mood for that, so we snuck into the theater that was playing this. I have no regrets as this movie made me hold my fiance a little bit tighter that night. Life is about choices, and Jack Campbell has to make that decision when his girlfriend tries to talk him out of going to Oxford University to pursue a financial scholarship, and begin life with her then and now. Kate is a beautiful girl, and Jack is caught between a rock and a hard place, and ends up leaving her at the airport, and goes onto success on Wall Street, but his life is lonely, and he has no one to love him in that special way. He's made aware of this when one night on the way home he is acosted by a gun toting criminal, and more or less Jack is made to review his life, and Jack just blows him off, and goes home to bed, and then he wakes up married to Kate, and is a father of 2. They live in a house in Jersey, and Jack works for Kate's uncle at a tire store. Jack is not sure of how to deal with this, and at first he doesn't believe this is happening, but as time goes on he begins to love Kate, and his children. However, the dream ends and Jack wakes up alone. He got a note from Kate to see him again, and now he wonders what's up. It turns out that Kate has done well for herself, and she just wants Jack to pick up his stuff before she moves to her new home.....Jack can't believe how beautiful Kate looks, and now feels like he has to make a move somehow, however, this time he makes the right decision, and stays with Kate. I am not much into romantic movies, but this is one of my 5 favorite romantic movies, and as I said I held my fiance a little bit tighter that night. This was overlooked, and should be considered a classic as Nicholas Cage and Tia Leone turned in good performances. I know that this movie also taught me that the best way to go was with dvd as when I first wanted to buy this movie, and I was going to buy it!!!!However, the VHS copy was fifty bucks, and the dvd was a lot less. I still watch this to this day, and hope I will be remarried again someday.

4/5 Jobs vs. Children
  by Michael Wycklendt (chicago)
Excellent story line, especially for those transitioning from college into the work world. It makes you think about your own life and what you might want