Movie Review: "Next"
[ 2007: Action, Drama, Sci-fi, a bit of Comedy ]
Throughout the movie <i>Next</i> (starring Nicholas Cage and Julianne Moore)—which I was able to watch about a month ago, before its official release, thanks to my airplane flight going home from Indonesia—the atmosphere to me was exactly reminiscent of Cage's previous work, <i>National Treasure</i>. Basically, if you did not like NT, do not watch this; if you found it satisfactory, as I just about did, then you will probably find this likewise.
<b>[ SPOILERS: PLOT SUMMARY ]</b>
The movie regards the life of Cris Johnson, who is a Las Vegas magician known by the alias Frank Cadillac and a gambling smoker. He has the psychic ability to see two minutes into his direct future, which explains how he is able to win in his poker games and other situations of "luck" so perfectly. He
The very end of the movie is extremely intriguing.
<b>[ END SPOILERS ]</b>
<b>[ CRITICISM INVOLVING SPOILERS ]</b>
There are some things that aren't explained in the movie, that seem very vestigial and appear to have been thrown in, in my opinion, just for added drama. One such example is a moment when he becomes aware of his winning strait, and decides to exchange his poker-chips for money before the Las Vegas casino's security becomes too suspicious of him. He seems to be too late, yet in return, he just looks straight up at the camera that is monitoring him! That really didn't make any sense at all, since his power should not let him be able to do that, unless he took two minutes of envisioning to march straight up to the security office and somehow found out exactly that he was already being watched.
The computer-generated animation seems to fall a bit in standards; during an otherwise spectacular scene of mayhem, in which a truck is blindly driven into a tower and sends a large pile of logs stumbling down a ravine right behind him to distract his pursuers, anyone can see that all of the material is clearly animated; the graphics almost look like they are from the millennium, early 2000s. However, the ghosting of his multiple mental forms near the end of the movie that allows him to investigate an entire section of a building in a few seconds partly redeems this, as the animation in seeing over a dozen Cages in one screen (with the camera smoothly panning!) is flawless and very clean.
<b>[ END SPOILER-CRITICISM ]</B>
Cage's acting as always is superb, top-notch for the representation of his slick character. The other jobs are decent, I feel.
To sum it all: if you can suspend your logic and ignore some possibly <b>very</b> pestering unexplained details (as was somewhat needed in <i>National Treasure</i>), you will probably appreciate this work. If you are looking for mainly comedy like in NT, this may not be the best one to look into, as it felt to me somewhat more serious and urgent.