One suspected little of The Family Man. The trailer suggested schmaltzy family fodder pitched for the Christmas Holiday season. The surprise is that The Family Man is not too bad a film. This is an admission one makes despite a film where one’s sensibilities are revolting throughout against something that vaunts marriage, the nuclear family, settling for underachievement and a cloying sense of second-place ordinariness as the greatest things in life. That said, you cannot fault the film’s presentation. It is never a film that reaches for simplistic emotional cues. It enwraps one in each situation and conducts it with feeling rather than ersatz melodrama. Director Brett Ratner achieves some beautiful moments of authentic affect – Nicolas Cage trying to cope with his daughter about to burst into tears, confronting his flirtations with Evelyn, his realization of love for Tea Leone. In the first half, the film gets some great comic mileage out of the idea of a high-flying banker suddenly forced to adjust to the horror of a third-rate job and lower working class lifestyle. The ending, to the film’s considerable credit, wraps things up with something more complex than a pat feelgood ending.

Director Brett Ratner had previously emerged with the entirely lightweight Rush Hour (1998) and went onto two sequels The Family Man (2001) and Rush Hour 2 (2007). In an abrupt change of tone, Ratner would next go onto helm the Hannibal Lecter prequel Red Dragon (2002) and followed this up with the controversial X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). He has also acted as producer on a number of genre films including Santa’s Slay (2005), Skyline (2010) and Mother’s Day (2011).