Based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “The Golden Man”, Next follows Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage), a man who was born with the ability to see two minutes into the future. The catch is that he can only see two minutes into his own future. He can’t tell what will happen to someone one else or see future events unless he’s personally involved with them in some way. Cris doesn’t like the attention his ability garners and makes his living as a small time lounge act in Las Vegas doing parlor tricks for bored tourists.
When Cris begins seeing visions of a woman named Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel) in his future, he’s confused. She is appearing to him much farther out than two minutes. He continues to try to pinpoint when she is appearing so he can meet her and find out why she is the only exception to the “two minute rule”. His quest to meet the girl of his visions becomes even more important after he foils a robbery at a casino.
FBI agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore) has been watching Cris and has plans to use him to help track down a stolen nuclear warhead. The FBI’s pursuit of Cris has alerted the bad guys (who are never fully explained or fleshed out) to Cris’ ability and they simply want him dead before he can tell the FBI where the warhead is located.
Cris’ ability allows him to dodge bullets and punches and that makes him damn near invincible. Because there doesn’t seem to be any weakness to his ability aside from the time limitations of his vision, the writers didn’t seem to know how to use it to propel the story along.
While it’s clear that director Lee Tomahori knows how to handle action sequences, Next contains very few of them. After opening with Cris stopping the robbery and then escaping casino security and the police, the script sets a pace that the rest of the movie can never match. When the second act tries to make us believe that a woman as attractive as Biel can fall in love with someone like Cage, it makes their scenes together more unbelievable than the idea of a character can see two minutes into the future.
Even more frustrating than the pacing is the fact that we never learn why Liz is appearing to Cris so far out of his normal range of vision. Once the terrorists learn she’s with Cris, she becomes the sole focus of the movie, reducing the far more interesting nuclear warhead plot to a footnote. The script even plays a dirty trick that I won’t spoil to “justify” this course of action.
Next is yet another mediocre Nicolas Cage action film with lofty ideas but no follow through.
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
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