Constant Viewer: Next

It’s hardly up to his Oscar-winning performance, but once again Nicholas Cage squeezes a worthy showing out of a role that has him, well, leaving Las Vegas. What’s more, Julianne Moore reprises her FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling persona, albeit as Special Agent (they’re all special in the FBI) Callie Ferris this time around in Next.

Cage plays Cris Johnson, a stage magician with the unexplained power of seeing his own life two minutes ahead of time. Better still, knowing how his life unfolds if he zigs one way permits Johnson to zag instead and thus change his short-term future. This permits him to perform his low budget lounge act in Las Vegas and supplement his earnings with a bit of low stakes gambling on the side. Meanwhile, nondescript but decidedly European looking nuclear terrorists are on the loose. Somehow, also unexplained, both the FBI and the terrorists get wind of Johnson’s uncanny ability and set out to get to him either to prevent or keep him from preventing the bomb from causing eight million deaths. Johnson wants nothing to do with any of it and so flees Las Vegas, finding love interest Liz (Jessica Biel) en route to the rest of this preposterous and yet still entertaining movie directed by Lee Tamahori (Mulholland Falls, Along Came A Spider). Peter Falk has a nice though small role in the film, as well.

Philip K. Dick is currently the hardest working dead author in Hollywood, his stories having provided the basis for Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly and now Next, all in just the last five years. Not bad for a guy who died twenty-five years ago and thus can’t take lunches with Hollywood players. Next is based on his 1954 short story “The Golden Man,” which Constant Viewer admits to not having read and thus will leave to others to say where Dick ends and the screenwriters begin here.

The thing about Next is that the viewer must completely suspend disbelief, and then just sit back and enjoy the ride. In return, there are three or four really fun scenes in Next that develop the potential of Johnson’s short range clairvoyance splendidly and Cage, himself, who takes the absurd premise and offers a convincing performance of a man whose gift (as Tony Shalub’s Monk would say) is also a curse. Movie goers who have already weathered Spider-Man 3 and are looking for something else to see until Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End opens on May 25th, will likely enjoy seeing what's Next.