Next ---- Nicolas Cage, Jessica Beil, and Julianne Moore look into the future

Never have I been more disappointed in the presentation of something that I felt was such a great premise and story. The build-up of the film Next but all of the key elements necessary to create a successful film, but when it came to the ending, everything fell completely flat. This is the story of Chris Johnson, played by Nicolas Cage, who all his life has had the ability to see two minutes into the future. The trick to it is that he can only see two minutes into his own future, limiting exactly what he can see. This has altered the way he lives his life, and has removed all the chance and surprise from the world around him. No movie ending surprises him, he sees right through plot twists, and most notably of all, he can figure out which direction to take in a dangerous situation. That is where the movie gets its originality from.

Johnson has been forced to take on the persona "Frank Cadillac", and perform magic tricks in order to put together some money. As a magician he is quite good though, almost too good as his tricks seem like they are real rather than being an illusion. This catches the eye of an FBI agent played by Julianne Moore, who starts to think that he could be the solution to her problem. It turns out that a nuclear weapon is being smuggled into the United States, and they have no leads as to who might be involved. They do think they know where it will end up though, and try to elicit the help of Johnson to see into the future where it might be. They don't know he can only see two minutes though, and she becomes obsessed with bringing him into the fold and solving the issue before the terrorist plot can unfold.

The movie starts out pretty intense, and the premise of Johnson being able to see those two minutes into the future takes the plot in many interesting directions. There is one riddle that he cannot solve though, because for some reason he is able to see further into the future when it comes to the life of one particular woman. That woman is played by Jessica Beil, and it quickly becomes evident that he is attracted to her, and when he finds out she is in danger, does everything in his power to try and protect her. With the film unfolding around Johnson, there are moments where the audience is wowed by his ability to flat-out change a situation by knowing exactly what route to take. The problem though is that there are things out of control that are starting to consume him, which include the mystery woman and the nuclear weapon.

Now Director Lee Tamahori did a great job at building up the story, and putting Nicolas Cage into situations where he could not fail as an actor. His stoic presence was taken full advantage of, and he was able to succeed within the story as it was written. The action sequences and dramatic moments build as the scenes start flashing by quicker and the climax of the movie starts to unfold. Unfortunately that is where everything starts to unravel, and everything about the story goes obscenely wrong. The movie suddenly turned from one that I enjoyed very much, into one that I was really upset about. It took me quite a while to write this review, because I didn't want to go off my gut reaction of disliking the film because of the third act. As it is, nothing has been gained by that delay, other than me disliking the film slightly less. It had a lot of great popcorn-eating action and a great premise, but at the end of the day wasn't worth the price of admission.