Cage's Weakest to date...

Rating: 7/10 (3 March 2007)

I'm a Nicolas Cage fan. I've liked every film of his that I've seen, and suffice to say this one is possibly his weakest. He has a certain charisma that saves his movies from being total train-wrecks, but even here it's an iffy save. His portrayal of the character is decent, although I did find a lot of the dialogue, particularly whenever they would start the whole "is this my destiny' style monologues, very tedious and cliché. And this was certainly not Eva Mendes' best movie, although you think the director wanted it to be considering the ridiculous number of nice-and-close shots of her. Her character existed entirely to be a reactionary person to Cage's lead, which gives her almost no depth and masks what skill Mendes has behind the 'ooh, save the pretty girl' device. Cinematographically, it wasn't bad. I didn't see as many painful homages to other Marvel movies as we saw in Daredevil, although I might need a second look to confirm that. The effects seemed fine to me, although personally the skull CG didn't seem quite to par with the fire effects. All in all, it's a good 'turn off your brain' popcorn movie, but it's certainly not going in my top 10.