Nicolas Cage scrapes the bottom...along with John Woo

The basic concept of the film, that Nicholas Cage was born with the ability to see 2 minutes into his own future...and can thus affect the outcome of the future...is kinda fun. That he has become a cheesy Vegas lounge-entertainer / mind-reader in order to elude the notice of the government is just unusual and plausible enough to amuse. It's funny to see Cage on a chintzy stage, performing really bad mind-reading tricks.

But we see these things in the first five minutes of the film...and it is straight downhill from there. It's hard to say enough bad things.

Let's start with Cage himself. He can be a superb screen actor...over the years I've loved him in RAISING ARIZONA, MOONSTRUCK, LEAVING LAS VEGAS and especially ADAPTATION. He was charming in PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED. He brought solid quirkiness to THE ROCK and even the underwhelming NATIONAL SECURITY. But he is on a huge loosing streak right now...GHOST RIDER was pretty bad, but WICKER MAN was laughable, and now NEXT allows him to reach absolute rock bottom. It's hard to imagine an actor looking less interested or engaged in his work. His hang-dog demeanor and droopy eyes now just simply make him look asleep. He also has really bad hair...it makes Tom Hanks in DAVINCI CODE look positively stylish. It is long and black...like bad spray-paint black...the type of hair-dye that community theaters buy at Walgreens. And his skin has a thick layer of the most unconvincing "tan" foundation I've seen in a movie since the days of STAR TREK TOS. He looks, frankly, like a man who is dying of a wasting disease and is trying to cover it. I mostly worried for Nicholas Cage's health watching NEXT. He's just hard to watch.

Julianne Moore is just wasted. She's been making some pretty poor choices lately...I guess the good roles she had been getting for awhile have run out. I think back a few months to CHILDREN OF MEN...a movie I LOVED...and I remember even then thinking the tough, action-minded thing was not her strong suit. Now I'm convinced of it. She is a tough woman, but needs to play it with an edge of fragility. That's what has always made her interesting. She flounders a bit in underwritten, generic roles. Jessica Biel, who helped her case as an actress with THE ILLUSIONIST, fails to convince in her silly role as a sensitive, unassuming young woman who teaches in the Native American villages around the Grand Canyon. There are also ZERO sparks between her and Cage...but that's more the fault of bad writing and bad Cage.

The plot goes from a trifling amusement to just plain ridiculous. There are one or two good ideas...such as late in the film when Cage sends himself in many directions at once to see where the bad guys are hiding. It's a rare moment of marginal originality. The action sequences are few and far between. The special effects are also fairly lame. If you saw the previews for the movie and saw the huge explosion...that's it! It made the film look almost like a disaster movie, with some expectation that the little snippet of film we saw was just a clip from more ambitious scenes of destruction. Nope...you saw it ALL.

Anyway, I've spent too much time on such a forgettable movie. Do not see NEXT. Simple as that.

This review is also posted at amazon.com and on my own website: afilmcritic.com