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Next film please

In Next, Nicholas Cage is on a hiding to nowhere. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CMC

In Next, a crummy action and speculative-fiction hybrid, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see into the future two minutes at a time. It's too bad that Cage couldn't tap into those same powers of divination to save himself from making yet another inexplicably bad choice in roles. Once one of the more enthralling actors in Hollywood (Leaving Las Vegas), Cage these days seems all too content to waste his and the audience's time in tacky genre throwaways.

What's bittersweet about all this is that Cage remains an insistently watchable screen presence, as even this dopey movie proves. In his day job, Cage's Cris Johnson works in a low-rent Vegas casino as a no-frills magician pulling doves out of his coat sleeves and modest factoids out of the minds of his audiences. He supplements his earnings by playing the slots and blackjack. Allergic to trouble and the overly curious, he keeps his profile low by betting only against the house, trying to cash out before he attracts too much attention. Ah, but there's trouble afoot in the form of a pushy FBI agent named Callie Ferris, played by Julianne Moore, yet another performer who seems intent on breaking the hearts of the faithful.

Film notes Next Directed By: Lee Tamahori Starring: Nicolas Cage (Cris Johnson), Julianne Moore (Callie Ferris), Jessica Biel (Liz Cooper), Thomas Kretschmann (Mr. Smith), Tory Kittles (Cavanaugh), Peter Falk (Irv) Running Time: 96 Minutes Taiwan Release: Today

Jaw locked, Moore seems terribly unhappy to be here, and it's no wonder. Her character is working the anti-terrorism beat, which requires her to be at once expert at her job, because she's one of the stars of the show, and a political straw woman who freely doles out cruel and unusual punishment while talking about the greater good, mostly because the screenwriters are obviously bored. She may not be nice, but, dammit, she is on the side of might and right. You see, there's a Russian nuclear device gone missing, and Agent Ferris knows, despite the eyeball-rolling of her superiors and underlings, that the only thing that stands between humanity and annihilation is a Las Vegas magician with a taste for martinis and blondes.

There's more, barely. Directed by Lee Tamahori and written by Gary Goldman, Jonathan Hensleigh and Paul Bernbaum, Next is based on a nifty short story by Philip K. Dick titled The Golden Man. First published in 1954 in the science-fiction magazine If, the story imagines a world in which mutants are rounded up and destroyed. The title character, a literally golden-hued mutant said to resemble a god, but whose intelligence comes nearer to that of an animal, can see far enough into the future to evade capture. Dick explained that the story was written when the trend in SF literature was to glorify mutants, which he saw as a self-serving, "dangerous hunger for power on the part of neurotic people."

Dick's story and Next have so little o do with each other that the writer's die-hard fans can relax: the great man's reputation has not been tainted by yet another knuckleheaded adaptation. Cage and Moore have it worse, since the spectacle of these two grimacing through so much risible dialogue and noisy action seems as wearing to them as to us.
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