Next (2007)

Next (2007) arrives with all the ambition of a man who has correctly guessed the next card and would like a modest amount of credit for it. Nicolas Cage plays Cris Johnson, a Las Vegas magician who sees two minutes into the future and converts that gift into small, cautious gambling wins. The FBI wants him. A cell of French terrorists wants him dead. Julianne Moore plays the agent assigned to capture him, and Jessica Biel plays the woman he has already seen walking into a diner. It is a thriller assembled from familiar parts, and it moves with the grim efficiency of a man hoping to beat traffic.

The instructive thing about Next is what it declines to be. Philip K. Dick's source story carried a distinct note of racial paranoia, and an early draft of the screenplay turned the pursuit into a genuinely nasty piece of anti-authoritarian fury, complete with a Department of Homeland Security that maims and tortures for the public good. Saturn Films had that rewritten. The FBI became sympathetic. The anger went out of it. What remains is a film with no interest in race, class, gender, or the climate. Its minority performers occupy standard procedural roles and are never asked to comment on the arrangement. The picture has opinions about nothing except the importance of catching a terrorist before the credits.

The third act is where it earns its reputation. Cris' escape, the raid on the port, the nuclear detonation, all of it turns out to have been a vision, and the timeline snaps back a day. Reviewers called it a cheat. The audience, which had paid for a movie, tended to agree. There is a certain honesty in a film that squanders its premise so completely and so early, leaving nothing behind but a pleasant afternoon for everyone involved and a mild sense of grievance for everyone else.