Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/29/07
Poor Phillip K. Dick.
I've never read any of the famous sci-fi writer's mind-bending stories,
and I suspect the same is true for many moviegoers to whom he's nonetheless
become a brand name. Some very good movies (Blade Runner,
A
Scanner Darkly, even the underrated Paycheck) have been made
from his works, but they've just as often been used as clotheslines upon
which to hang poorly thought-out sci-fi idiocy. This has never been
more true than in the case of Next, a movie that takes Dick's novel
The
Golden Man as an excuse to ask the question “What would you do if you
could see two minutes into the future?” The answer provided by screenwriters
Gary Goldman, Jonathan Hensleigh and Paul Bernbaum: pick up Jessica
Biel and then... uh, what was the question?
Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage)
is a Las Vegas magician whose cheesy lounge act is a cover for real powers:
born with the ability to see two minutes into the future, he knows what
number you're thinking of because he can see what would happen if he just
asked you. He's also able to see one thing beyond those two minutes:
a vision of a woman named Liz (Jessica Biel) entering a diner on some future
date. Cris is approached by mad dog FBI agent Callie Ferris (Julianne
Moore) who believes his power can provide leads to the whereabouts of a
missing Russian nuke. Using his powers, he escapes her pursuit long
enough to make his daily stop by that diner to see if Liz shows up and,
what do you know, she does. After using his future sight to trial
and error his way to just the right pickup line, he talks her into giving
him a ride out of town. As they fall in love on the road, two sets
of pursuers close in: Ferris and her agents and a group of Russian
thugs led by Mr. Smith (Thomas Kretschmann).
But don't worry about ol'
Cris: he's got the most preposterous and least logical superpower
in movie history to hold them off. Sure, that whole “I know what
to do because I've already seen all the possible permutations of what might
happen depending upon what choices I make” thing looks cool in the trailer,
but it becomes painfully obvious right out of the gate that the man would
need a dozen supercomputers to keep track of all the information he's supposed
to be processing. For instance: at one point, he instructs
Liz to start an avalanche of falling rocks and vehicles to distract Agent
Ferris's forces while he ducks, dives and dodges with perfect timing because
to him, “it's already happened”. I could literally go on all day
about how this makes no sense. If he's simultaneously seeing the
future and acting in the present, how does he keep the timing down?
Even though he's reacting to threats he saw two minutes ago before watching
two additional minutes of threats he's also got to remember, there's never
a moment where we see him counting seconds before doing something.
Plus, every time he does anything, it changes the future he's already seen,
requiring him to see it again and keep track of all the additional timing
required by those changes, which in turn change the future again.
The movie takes great pains to tell us again and again that the very act
of seeing the future changes it, which would seem to make anything he learns
useless on a second-by-second basis, particularly when there are a lot
of moving parts involved in what he's trying to pull off.
It turns out that Cris actually
can see beyond his two-minute window when Liz is involved, and he uses
that power once the poorly motivated and generally incompetent Russian
thugs (Worst. Terrorists. Ever.) grab her. Of course,
some explanation, any explanation beyond a few tossed off “Don't you believe
in destiny?”s for why this is true might have helped. Even when Cris's
actions aren't impossible to explain, they don't exactly charge the screen
with adrenalin. He spends what seems like hours late in the game
walking Agent Ferris and her team through the terrorist stronghold, telling
them where to shoot and which corner to turn like some kind of literal
Third Person Shooter. A duller action sequence is hard to imagine,
but luckily a sillier one is right around the corner, as he branches off
into dozens of on-screen clones that are supposed to show us his consideration
of every possible place he could search for the terrorists. Too bad
long shots show two and sometimes three Cris doubles searching the same
places. The man just doesn't know how to manage his time travel.
I'm sure the writers could
have come up with some kind of babble that would explain all this away,
but they don't even try, perhaps because their minds kept wandering back
to ways to use Cris's powers to woo Liz, the only really effective stuff
in the movie. The scene in the diner where they meet is genuinely
clever, and I kept wondering what happened to the smart, cautious Liz who
takes so many hypothetical pitches to wear down as the movie waffles back
and forth between considering her a saint or a moron. It's not every
movie love interest who's menaced by a government goon who threatens to
take away the Federal funding for the classes she teaches on a Indian reservation.
Of course, the same charity she shows to those kids seems to extend to
Cris, with whom she falls in love so quickly and so unwisely I'm tempted
to call Guinness to see if I've just witnessed some kind of unbelievability
record.
Director Lee Tamahori made
one of my favorite action movies of recent years, the James Bond flick
Die
Another Day, and brought a lot of energy to the silly XXX:
State of the Union. But here he's adrift, saddled with a script
that keeps one's brain too busy processing why everything that's happening
is really dumb to even think about being excited by his handful of pedestrian
action sequences. The avalanche is clearly the intended show-stopper,
and it's certainly massive, but again, where I should have been thinking
“Wow!” “Oooooh!” and “Duck!”, I was instead stuck on “Huh?”
“Why?” and “Oh, come on!”
The performances are all
over the map. Cage's role is initially full of that patented little
Nic Cage business, with him doing magic tricks and tossing off weird trivia,
but the moment the plot really kicks in, he becomes Generihero the rest
of the way, and the actor responds by being unusually tentative and bored.
No hesitation where Moore is concerned: she attacks the Agent Ferris
role with such lunatic ferocity I imagined that she must be the daughter
of Airplane's Rex Kramer. In fact, the movie made me think
that she'd be a real delight in that kind of spoof; alas, Next is
supposed to be taken seriously. Then there's Biel, poor, sweet, lovely
Jessica Biel, who starts off well in Liz and Cris's early scenes together
but is then flattened by the steamroller of her role's idiocy. Perhaps
she herself was so confused as to what her saintly hostage was supposed
to be thinking at any given time that she decided that looking hopelessly
dazed was the only way to play it. I just hate watching an actress
with as much spunk as she has in her best work get pressed down into the
tiny little box of the generic damsel in distress. Surely a smarter,
more three-dimensional woman could have advanced the plot in exactly the
same way Liz does. But at least she gets one or two good scenes before
crumbling: my heart really goes out to a few of the smaller roles.
The less said the better about a one-scene appearance by the legendary
Peter Falk, who's on hand primarily to utter a throwaway line about how
slowly he walks these days to explain why the camera lingers on him while
it seems to take 30 seconds for him to walk out of the frame. The
man's Columbo, for God's sake, give him the dignity of cutting away!
And oh, those pitiful terrorists, who the credits inform me actually have
names (Mr. Smith, Mr. White, Mr. Jones, Miss Brown, etc.) but whose primary
character trait ends up being that they don't look exactly the same.
A good Next drinking game would be taking a shot every time a terrorist
sniper seems to have one of the characters in his sights but doesn't take
the shot. I admired the way Kretschmann plays his role as if
it was actually a good one: he and Cage's one real confrontation
(mostly spoiled by the ad campaign) is one of the movie's few truly effective
moments.
But that confrontation comes
before the “surprise twist” at the end, which I suppose is there just in
case you felt that what had come before wasn't quite stupid enough for
you. And believe me, it's plenty stupid. The good news for
the late, great Philip K. Dick is that writer Goldman is kind enough to
take a “Screen Story by” credit which, for those of you not up on the latest
Writer's Guild credit procedures, is another way of saying “I took two
words from some novel and made everything else up”. Rest in peace,
Phil. |
