In the title role, Nicolas Cage plays self-involved Chicago TV weatherman Dave Spritz, who manages to look animated and upbeat on camera, but dour and depressed the rest of the time. He's a showman, not a meteorologist, and one of life's many frustrations is the fact that his job is basically meaningless. He doesn't have a clue what the weather will bring. His duty is to look happy while breaking the bad news (his trademark, "the Spritz Nipper," involves forecasting which day of the week is gonna suck the most), and rather than shooting the messenger, his angry audience responds by pelting Spritz with fast food when they spot him in the streets. They've been doing that a lot lately.

Now, in the last 15 years or so, there has been no shortage of movies about weathermen. Bill Murray and Jim Carrey played dissatisfied local weather guys in Groundhog Day and Bruce Almighty, respectively, while Steve Martin had the easiest job on earth as an L.A. weather reporter in L.A. Story. Nicole Kidman even played a weather woman in To Die For. In each of those movies, the characters' jobs made sense, but here, Spritz's gig serves no purpose other than to justify the movie's seemingly endless barrage of rain, sleet, and snow.

Part of me wonders why screenwriter Steve Conrad didn't make his title character a film critic instead. Just imagine the potential there: A disgruntled low-level TV personality goes through life criticizing everything in sight. Nothing measures up to his impossible ideal, least of all his personal life. His ex-wife hates his guts; his daughter's unpopular and overweight; his son's on probation; his father's dying; and everywhere he goes, his "fans" try to hit him with "one wormy apple."

This is Cage's least idiosyncratic performance in years, but also the most difficult to identify with as an audience. Conrad has written and Verbinski has captured moments in Spritz's life that will resonate with anyone – everyday foibles like forgetting the tartar sauce or losing your temper at the DMV – but they haven't imbued them with the empathetic quality that someone like James L. Brooks (on the Hollywood end) or Alexander Payne (on the indie side of things) brings to the table. Their movie is cold, and I mean that not as a weather pun, but in the sense that it's impossible to warm up to a character who sees the awful things happening around him strictly in terms of how they affect him. What Spritz needs is a new outlook.

[as featured on Premiere.com]