It Could Happen to You
First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Andrew Bergman. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Bridget Fonda, Rosie Perez, Wendell Pierce, Isaac Hayes, Victor Rojas, Stanley Tucci, Ann Dowd, Seymour Cassel, Richard Jenkins, Red Buttons, J.E. Freeman, Robert Dorfman, Kay Tong Lim, Charles Busch, Ranjit Chowdhry, Vincent Pastore, Frank Pellegrino, Claudia Shear. Screenplay: Jane Anderson. VOR:②
I do pine for romcoms that dwell on character and sidestep the madcap. I also miss this Cage. So, modestly valuable. No million-dollar check.
Yesterday, I saw a 101-minute Nicolas Cage movie where nobody exhibited much recognizable human behavior and the last third was a too-accelerated shambles, but I basically enjoyed it.
Today, I saw a 101-minute Nicolas Cage movie where nobody exhibited much recognizable human behavior and the last third was a too-accelerated shambles, but I basically enjoyed it.
Today's movie is perfectly good company while you're making dinner. Yesterday's movie, if watched while making dinner, might trick you into doing irreversible things with your knives or crawling into your oven.
Yesterday's movie involved a major unsolved mystery, entailing a series of occult murders. Today's involved a major unsolved mystery, entailing how strenuously 90s Hollywood tried to make Bridget Fonda happen over and over and over and over and then how, in the 21st century, Bridget Fonda completely withdrew from any effort at making herself happen. On screen, anyway. Hopefully she's having a wonderful life. At least she didn't leave before serving up perfection in Jackie Brown.
Yesterday's movie proved that Nicolas Cage can slide right into a wildly offbeat artist's excessive, devoutly erratic, uncomfortable, super-creepy, occasionally semicomic, increasingly demonic murder mystery and totally own his role without pulling focus from the rest of the film or its team. Today's movie proved that Nicolas Cage can slide right into a safe, anonymous, studio director-for-hire's lightweight, folksy, patchily written, refreshingly cazh, post-Pretty Woman romantic fable and totally own his role without pulling focus from the rest of the film or its team. It's bizarre that Cage seems so hard to cast, and yet at different times he's lasted years at a time as a go-to actor for bizarro comedies, character dramas, action spectaculars, and adult-skewing chick flicks and all of this worked out and made money more often than not. This, too, is an unsolved mystery, as is the shape of Cage's post-Adaptation career, though it's been nice to see things heating up again.
Yesterday's movie turns out to be haunted by the Devil, though that's all I'll say. Today's movie turns out to be haunted by the Devil, in the form of the flagrantly sexist, shrilly written, shrilly played Rosie Perez character. Nobody comes off looking good in relation to this character concept or execution. In fact, It Could Happen to You would almost certainly be better if the Cage character's wife was either sympathetic (more complicated story!) or fun to be around (more entertaining story!) or both. But sometimes people, whether churchy Oregon fathers or well-known feminist screenwriters like Jane Anderson, become temporarily possessed by very dark impulses, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Today's movie is about a sweet-souled, heroic cop who doesn't want to stop being a cop even when he wins the lottery, and who decides to take half of a multimillion-dollar windfall away from his Latina wife of many years and give it instead to a rando white lady he just met the day before, and the whole thing is narrated by a Magical Negro, and I'm pretty sure that under current cultural rubrics, all of this counts as a horror movie.
But, featherweight as it is, it's sweet, mostly? And the movie shows rare grace in letting us come gently toward it, rather than trying at every moment to charm the fuck out of us, like so many flicks of this ilk? And there's Ann Dowd, looking and acting nothing like Aunt Lydia, and early-career Wendell Pierce being a sunny sport about playing fourth banana, and Richard Jenkins before we mostly knew him, and Red Buttons long after we thought we'd said goodbye, and Stanley Tucci with a genuinely startling six pack, formidable pecs, and meticulous upper-body manscaping, the showcasing of which was evidently a major rider in his contract.
Nothing in this movie could happen to you, no matter who you are. But if it shows up on TV or you're just following a random streaming impulse, then sure, hey, let it happen to you. Grade:C+
