Review of Next (2007) by Markb. — 10 May 2007

If the lady with the baby carriage in The French Connection could've seen two minutes into her future, she would've turned the corner to avoid the shooter...and her child would've grown up with a mom.

If Chrissie, the girl who went nude swimming at the beginning of Jaws, could've seen two minutes into the future, she would've stayed onshore and had a pleasant, intimate evening with the guy who DIDN'T follow her into the water, causing the shark to swim elsewhere (resulting, of course, in a five-minute movie).

And to be really frivolous about this, if Pee Wee in Porky's could've seen two minutes into the future, he could've anticipated which high school girls were going to step into the shower at any given time and claimed the peephole for himself! Obviously, Next's central premise is a fascinating one, and no doubt the Philip K.

Dick story played it for all it was worth, but what Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) and his writers have strangled out of it lurches between deadeningly generic (can we please, please for once have an action/ chase movie that DOESN'T feature a warehouse scene?) and frustratingly incomprehensible, as though it had no future (or past) recall whatsoever.

Nicolas Cage plays a Vegas magician/ card player who uses said ability to eke out a living until his life is complicated by a grim FBI agent (Julianne Moore, who looks like she can't wait to get to her favorite leather bar after hours) who wants to use his skills to thwart a mad bomber.

..in, uh, two minutes?!? A perfunctory, tension-killing romance with Jessica Biel, whose future Cage has strange insights into, adds a smarmily sexist flavor to the proceedings, but the worst of Next's many felonies is a fraudulent pseudo-surprise ending that's the worst of its kind since the thoroughly illogical wrap-up to Alejandro Aja's exuberant shower-o'-gore High Tension two years ago with the notable difference that Aja's movie was actually WORKING before its last few minutes demolished it.

You know, if Biel could see two minutes into the future, any script she's handed would induce her to immediately jump ahead to the towel scene and the "morning-after" scene in which her character is in bed covered with one of those miracle sheets that simultaneously covers her breasts and protects the movie's PG-13 rating, and having done so to turn it down, realizing that such movies are any attractive young actress's surest ticket to thirtysomething oblivion.

If Cage could see two minutes into the future, HE'D automatically nix ANY action, horror or fantasy script handed him, realizing that (mediocre Marvel Comics adaptations released during slow moviegoing times of year notwithstanding) familiarity really is beginning to breed contempt.

And if the normally sublime Moore (who's been through a really, really rough patch lately, giving one-note, nails-on-the-board performances in Freedomland, Trust the Man and this) could see two minutes into the future, she'd attach herself like Super Glue to Todd Haynes, who directed her finest work in Safe and Far From Heaven, waiting for the moment in which he's in a terrific mood so she can ask, nay BEG him to pull off a hat trick for her because she (and, God knows, ALL of her fans) desperately can use it.