That's enough to make it respectable, but a few things keep "Next" from being lovable or memorable. For one thing, the nuclear angle is a little heavy for what is essentially light entertainment. For another, the filmmakers seem to try to distract the audience with less important story elements.
They introduce the idea of nuclear terrorism and then, with the fate of the country and 8 million lives in the balance, they concentrate for a long while on the (Jessica Biel), a young woman he's just met: Will she like him? When will they not. Cage, who seems to have found his calling giving first-rate performances in second-rate movies, adopts an air of vague dislocation for the role, befitting someone who goes through life never quite in the moment.
Johnson is a low-level Las Vegas "mentalist," earning a living through a genuine gift that his audience assumes is fake. Cage plays him as weary and rueful and just a little bit weird in the course of his normal existence, and yet in a crisis, in which his talent becomes essential to his survival, he suddenly becomes purposeful and focused. Cage's psychologically detailed rendering of a screenwriter's gimmick premise gives "Next" whatever truthfulness it has.
Julianne Moore plays a tough-as-nails FBI agent, the kind who violates the Bill of Rights two or three times every day before breakfast, and she gets a big idea: She has a hunch that the mentalist could be for real, and she thinks that maybe he might be able to help locate the stray nuclear bomb. But wait, isn't that odd? Two minutes is hardly enough lead time for a government agency trying to prevent a disaster.
What do they expect from him? Perhaps someone to say, "Prepare to blow up in two minutes." Thus, the film's two big plot for an uneasy match.
Speaking of uneasy matches, who cares about terrorist threats when there's Biel to consider? Johnson sees her from a distance of several days -- she's to meet her for the first time in a diner at a particular time. The FBI can and bewildered, both of which are appropriate.
But the movie's real kicks come in those scenes in which our hero's talent gets put to full use. An escape finish, in which he keeps avoiding death and disaster by playing out all the variables in his head, every step of the way. It's impressive, an action sequence unlike any other, and the one exceptional thing to take from the DHE, has an opening in our
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