Nicolas Cage...umm...Next, Please

Despite the star power of Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel, Next was a box office bomb that didn’t stay in theaters for too long this past summer. Although it uses an interesting premise, it suffers from too much CGI, a convoluted plot, and is a general mess of a movie. This movie is based on a story by Philip K. Dick, who also wrote stories that were adapted into Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report.

In this movie, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see two minutes into the future. While this might seem like a pretty cool power to have, it is really quite limiting. Even so, there’s a lot more he could do with it than what his character does. He lives in Las Vegas, and he earns a living by putting on a lame magic show where he guesses things about people by looking into the future to hear their answers. When he’s not doing that gig, he likes to visit the different casino games, but he never bets too much because he does not want to alert the security. Basically, he’s a bit of a sleazebag.

Julianne Moore plays an FBI agent who has had her eye on Cage’s character for some time. While most audience members see the show as either luck or a gimmick, Moore’s character begins to suspect that he might have real powers of foresight. She tries to enlist Cage’s help to locate a stolen nuclear bomb that is thought to have been planted somewhere in Los Angeles. Along the way, Cage meets a pretty girl (Jessica Biel) and tries to avoid FBI entanglements.

While this movie has a few really great scenes, as a whole it was rather disappointing. For starters, the movie is only 90 minutes long, and there’s so much going on that it all seems very rushed. Cage’s character isn’t a very charismatic guy at all, and the way he tries and tries to approach the girl is rather creepy. I just didn’t like him in this movie. He also had this weird long hair like Tom Hanks wore in The Da Vinci Code and it made him look ridiculous.

There were a couple of neat foot chase parts where Cage avoids the pursuers by looking ahead and hiding where he knows they won’t look. There’s a chase scene in a casino that was brilliantly choreographed. Toward the end of the movie, there’s one part where he single handedly searches an entire warehouse, and it shows how he goes down many different paths simply by looking ahead at what might happen if he walked that way.

The villains in this movie could not have been more cookie cutter, and they didn’t have much to do besides talk with accents to help us tell who is good and bad. I thought this whole aspect of the story could have been given a better treatment to make it all seem a little more believable. This movie also has a rather crazy ending that bothered a lot of people. I might have been bothered by trying to make sense of it if I thought this movie was worth the time to think about, but it wasn’t.

This was directed by Lee Tamahori, and he’s in quite a directorial slump. Prior to this movie bombing, he directed the absolutely horrible sequel XXX: State of the Union. This movie suffered from a lot of the same problems as that one, including too much CGI, lack of character development, and too many action movie clichés. It’s hard to believe this is the same director who did the crazy James Bond movie Die Another Day just a couple of years prior. Just for trivia’s sake, you might also like to know that Tamahori was arrested for prostitution shortly before this movie went into production. He was dressed in drag and was busted by an undercover cop after Tamahori solicited him for sex.

If you like science fiction action movies, you might enjoy watching Next, but it’s a shame this movie did not live up to its potential.