Next (2007)

[Neville]

Plot: Cris Johnson earns a living with a rather silly "mentalist" number in Las Vegas. What nobody knows is that his abilities are in fact real, and that he can read the inmediate future, just about two minutes. His talent makes him the target of the FBI and a terrorist group that plans to detonatea nuclear weapon in LA.

Comments: Oh, Philip K. Dick, what have they done to you? There's no other way to describe this film than "pedestrian". The mentalist subplot is reduced to a silly gimmick, so now and then we get Nicholas Cage "rewinding" the film after he is killed or making weird movements to evade bullets or other objects thrown at him, and although I haven't read the original story I'm pretty sure all they took from it was the "man on the run" structure, which Dick used often. If this wasn't bad enough, we get Cage (looking weirder than ever) romancing Jessica Biel (looking hotter than ever) in a series of unconfortable scenes, and a bunch of French-speaking villains nobody tells us nothing about.

Good things? Well, there are actually a couple of good things. Julianne Moore is particularly good as a tough-as-nails FBI agent, she never tries to make her character any sympathetic and that somehow works in her favour. And the ending manages to wrap things up rather elegantly, in a surprisingly low key fashion.

But apart from that, I'd rather watch any other Dick adaptation out there. Even "Paycheck". Well, not "Paycheck", but any other one.

[Archivist]

I didn't even know what Next was until I saw the last 20 minutes of it on TV a few months ago.  As I came into the movie way too late, I had no idea how Cage was supposed to have been able to dodge bullets and throw things at people who would suddenly walk around the corner.  It did seem rather silly, and I found the ending a bit of a cop-out as well.  Maybe I'll watch it properly if it comes on TV again.

The thing that bothers me about Nicolas Cage is his body.  He has a weirdly gangly, slightly awkward body type that even the muscles of Con Air could not completely hide.  So when he's doing these action hero things, it's done by a strangely awkward looking man, which does not work for me.

[Neville]

Yeah, that's a problem too. Even if his acting wasn't that lazy, as with many other stars he just don't look like anyone we may meet. I was shocked when Jessica Biel was so nice to him. the man looks like a hobo or somebody whjo just escaped from an asylum.

[Archivist]

Nicolas Cage's acting is not lazy.  Look, he's one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP1-oquwoL8