Did you know that Nicholas Cage uses a device called a Nicholas Gauge to pick which movies he will feature in? When he is given a script, he feeds it through his Nicholas Gauge, and it tells him whether he should accept the role or not. If the film is utterly and totally terrible, the Nicholas Gauge tells him to go ahead and say yes.

Next is one of the latest films the Nicholas Gauge gave the green light to. It is the story of Chris Johnson, a man with the ability to see 2 minutes into his future, who is asked by the FBI to help stop a terrorist detonate a nuclear bomb in America. Chris refuses to do so for no apparent reason and from this point on is chased by both the FBI, and the terrorists the FBI are trying to stop. Oh and he does some sex to Jessica Biel, which is pretty cool.

I’m going to be fair to this film, there were a couple of things that weren’t totally shit. I generally hate films where someone has a super power or special ability, because it just pisses me off that they don’t use it properly. In most films where the character has a special ability, there are a hundred ways that they could use that ability to achieve their objective unbelievably easily, but they never do even one of them, which makes the film frustrating. However, Next actually did a good job of making Johnson use his power to the maximum benefit. There were a few exceptions of course, like the fact that he wasn’t ludicrously rich. He did use his power for gambling in a casino, but he deliberately didn’t win too much ‘so he can keep coming back’. Or here’s a thought, why not just win so much money that you don’t have to come back? He could easily have just gone to a bookmakers, waited for a race where a 100-1 shot was going to come in, and then placed $10,000 on it. Or put $10,000 on a number coming up on the roulette table. Or he could have played the stock market and been horrifically rich within days. Instead he was poor and shit, and if you had his ability, you wouldn’t be. But I’ll let that go, because for the rest of the film, they actually had Johnson use his power pretty intelligently. The best example was when he wanted to first speak to Jessica Biel, and he ran through every different way he could approach her and start talking to her to see which one wouldn’t result in him being shot down. If I had that power, pretty much the first thing I’d use it for is having sex with Jessica Biel, so that was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, that’s the nice stuff over, so let’s get on to the shittiness, which is abundant. The script. Ohhh the script. Watching this film you get the impression the script was put together in the style of a newspaper cutting ransom note. It wasn’t written by anyone, someone just got lots of other action film scripts and cut bits out that they thought would be useful. They then pasted it all together, and we were left with this weird Papier-mâché deformity of clichés and platitudes that constantly drags you away from any sense of being involved in the film.

Then there’s Julianne Moore, who I first saw in Boogie Nights and thought was pretty good, and just saw in Next, and thought was a talentless sack of shit. She was terrible in this film. To put into context just how terrible, Nicholas Cage was in this movie, and he wasn’t the worst actor in it. Even Nicholas Cage’s haircut, which was obscene, was better than Julianne Moore in this movie.

And of course we have Jessica Biel. If you ever happen to read this review Jessica Biel, can you please let me be your agent, because whoever is doing it at the moment is a fucking dickhead. Jessica Biel is ludicrously hot and she can sort of act, so there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be a huge star. Unfortunately, her choice of films is almost as terrible as Nicholas Cage’s. Here is some advice Jessica: If the plot involves a talking plane, don’t do the film. If it involves firemen pretending to be gay, don’t do the film. If it’s based around a mobile phone, don’t do the film. And please, for the love of god, if Nicholas Cage has agreed to do it, DON’T DO THE FILM!

So anyway, the actual film. This film actually could have been alright, it was just really lazy when it came to the plot. They had the concept which was pretty good, a guy who can see two minutes into the future is pretty interesting. As I mentioned earlier, they even used the concept quite well and did a good job of that. But the problem was they didn’t get the concept a decent vehicle. The story was so lazy and cliché that you really didn’t give a fuck either way. What they failed to do quite spectacularly was give any of the characters any motivation for doing any of the things they were doing. There was no reason for Chris Johnson to be running away from the FBI when he could of just helped them. There was no reason for the FBI to think he can see into the future other than the fact they saw him do a magic show. And there was no reason for the apparent terrorists to be planning to detonate a Nuke in America. As a result, there is no reason to watch this film.

Oh, and at the end it turns out that everything you just watched was just a premonition Johnson had, and none of it actually happened.

Yeah.

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