A New York beat cop, having just spent his last dollar on his weekly Lotto ticket, and not wanting to stiff a waitress on her fifteen percent of two coffees, disdains the standard line ("Catch you later") and, in order to underscore his earnestness, goes through some laboriously written dialogue to the effect that half of his lottery winnings are earmarked for her. When these turn out to be four million dollars, he resolves to be true to his word -- "A promise is a promise" -- despite the hurricane-force attempts of his wife to alter his course. It is somehow not surprising that a self-professed fairy tale about finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (waitress to cop: "What you did was like a fairy tale") would be susceptible to bouts of indolence. Our two winners are set up to be models of virtue (a truer title: It Couldn't Happen to Nicer Guys), but the movie can't come up with much for them to do, aside from a few showy gestures such as giving away subway tokens to rush-hour commuters or reserving one table for paupers at the waitress's coffee shop -- that is, the coffee shop that she now owns as well as in which she still waits tables. More damagingly, this romantic comedy relieves its hero and heroine, or its fairy-tale prince and princess, from any and all of the comedic chores. The notion that goodness, modesty, honesty, generosity, etc., could be fodder for comedy, rather than just for gold-medal commendation, never crosses the filmmakers' minds. One wonders what Preston Sturges might have made of the premise. (Something in the nature of Christmas in July, one would suppose.) One wonders, even, what the present director, Andrew Bergman, of The Freshman and Honeymoon in Vegas, might have made of it if he had written the screenplay himself instead of accepted the pile of mush handed in from Jane Anderson. With Nicolas Cage, Bridget Fonda, Rosie Perez. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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