I'm not trying to knock Nick Cage too much. He was offered andopportunity to make millions every year making often-times rubbish movies and he took it. If someone offered me (and most people) the same deal they would take it. That being said, this film shows that Cage actually can act... sometimes.

The story behind this is that Nick doesn't have super-human abilities, which must have been strange for him to ponder when looking at the script. As a matter of fact, Ben Sanderson (Cage) has a horribly tragic flaw - he is a massive alcoholic. While managing to be quite successful despite his extreme abuse of booze, things are starting to fall apart when he loses his job as a well-paid screenwriter (oh, the irony) but manages to get a hefty severance pay package.

Rather than try to turn his life around (as we would expect from a movie of this sort) Ben makes the choice that he is going to sell everything he owns and then go to Las Vegas and drink himself to death. While in Vegas he nearly runs over a prostitute and later finds her and offers her $500 to come to his room for an hour. Rather than use prozzies for what you would think, he talks to her and they develop a relationship.

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Sera, the prostitute is played by Elisabeth Shue, who I had forgotten was still an actress until this came out. She does a fantastic job in it and of course, it quite hot. They have an interesting relationship that gets them both in trouble but Ben has so much money that he buys his way out of it for the most part. Things are going well for them but Ben has just one request of her

you can never ask me to stop drinking

I'm not going to reveal much else about the film but just know this: It is touching and it is a phenomenal performance by Shue and Cage, the latter of which is a normally extremely critical of for his backlog of horrible pictures. This one isn't action packed but it holds your interest in other ways.

This movie made back its budget and like $50 million more and one critic actually said "this movie shows that Nicholas Cage can be a great actor" so it appears that I am not alone in my assessment. I honestly believe this is one of his best films and it just so happens to be one that a lot of people haven't even heard of.

7.5 / 10