Next (***)

? Blessed, or cursed, with the ability to see two minutes into the future, a small-time Vegas magician (Nicolas Cage) becomes the target of a government scientist (Julianne Moore) who wants to use him to prevent a terrorist attack. (To see the future means that you can change it.) Based on a story by the late Philip K. Dick, who seems to have been nearly as busy lately as Jane Austen racking up screen credits.
+ How might one use a remarkable ability both in everyday life and to get out of a tight spot? If the movie can show us this, and seem to follow its own logic, then it’s succeeded, and for the most part Next does. This makes up for the inevitable plot holes. There’s a balanced mix of suspense, action, and even some romance and comedy, as when the aging magic man uses his mental fast-forwarding abilities to see which of several approaches will help him pick up a girl in a diner. Played by Jessica Biel, she turns out to be an important part of the story, not just a subplot. There’s a nice finish that seems surprisingly sudden, then just right.
- Having Cage’s character foresee his meeting with Biel well in advance makes it that much harder to suspend disbelief. How come the two-minutes rule doesn’t apply with her? Also, how does the ability to know someone’s about to shoot you give you the timing skills to duck out the way at the exact right moment? And how will a two-minute advance warning help the government stop a nuke from going off? More prosaically, it’d have been nice to lend some plausibility to the story by giving the French-speaking terrorists a motive, though it doesn’t matter to the story.
= *** Next has next to nothing to do with the original story, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to compare it to other recent Philip K. Dick adaptations, but I will anyway: it doesn’t come near the heights of Minority Report, which expertly used the sci-fi angle to explore ethical and societal issues, but it beats Paycheck, which turned a great premise into a forgettable action film, and A Scanner Darkly, which could have used some action.

IMDB link

reviewed 5/4/07