Family Man, The

A high-powered Wall Street shark (Nicolas Cage) wakes up Christmas morning to find himself married to the girfriend (Tea Leoni) he dumped 13 years ago—married for years, in fact, with two kids and a job working for his father-in-law. David Diamond and David Weissman’s script is sort of It’s a Wonderful Life in reverse, an effort both to create a holiday classic and to domesticate the restless, feral combustibility of Nicolas Cage. It’s not entirely successful at either; Diamond and Weissman’s ending is hasty and unsatisfying, as if they hadn’t thought it through. But Cage is as full of surprises as ever, Brett Ratner directs with an eye for the cluttery details of middle-class life, and the film has many good scenes of the evolution of a heartless loner into a loving husband and father.