# City of Angels (1998)

### reviewed by
Bob Bloom

City of Angels (1998) 1 star out of 4. Starring Nicolas Cage, Meg Ryan, Dennis Franz and Andre Braugher.

A wise person once admonished that every film should be judged on its own merits, whether it's an original or a rip-off of an excellent foreign film.

So, this is how City of Angels will be assessed.

There is not much good to say about this sappy, manipulative, Hollywoodized, cliché-ridden love story. To sum it up: angel meets girl, angel and girl fall in love, angel yearns to become human to get girl, and so on and so on.

This is a movie done by the numbers. It has some wonderful cinematography, but overall, the City of Angels feels hollow and cold.

The performances are adequate, except that the stars, Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, are really given nothing to do but mope around Los Angeles. And while they look good, it's hard to sustain a movie for almost two hours on looks alone.

Screenwriter Dana Stevens fails to evoke any true emotions. In a movie that begs for intimacy, her script is joyless and distant. It is more a romance novel transferred to screen than a fairy-tale-like story of yearning for the experience of being mortal.

Basically, what is on screen is a story about a guy who happens to be an angel who develops the hots for a good-looking woman and will do anything to get close to her.

The story's conceit, that angels are all around us, watching us and aiding us through the trial and tribulations of life, is fine, though not original.

But Stevens cheats. She allows humans and angels to interact at will. In movies of this sort, the rules by which the divine and the mortal behave usually are rigid and unbroken. To break them at will is lazy screenwriting.

Cage and Ryan make a wistful couple. The script doesn't allow them to be more than two glamorous movie stars playing roles.

The movie is saved by Dennis Franz as Nathan Messenger, a person who understands all too well the worlds of Cage's Seth and Ryan's Dr. Maggie Rice.

However, his screen time is limited, and it is left to Cage and Ryan to carry this story. But, unfortunately, the load is too heavy, and they are weighed down by a heavy-handed and ill-conceived storyline.

City of Angels requires a deft, poetic hand. It's a fragile story that needs to unfold slowly without sledgehammering its audience.

Unfortunately, those behind the enterprise haven't the required skill.

If you want to see it done correctly, go to your video store and rent Wim Wenders' 1988 classic, Wings of Desire. Or wait a couple of months. City of Angels will probably be joining it on the shelves by then.

Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, Ind. You can e-mail him at bloom@journal-courier.com or at cbloom@iquest.net

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