Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly – the stories of sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick have spawned some of the best future-shock cinema of recent times… as well as Paycheck.
Sadly, this adaptation of Dick’s novel The Golden Man ranks alongside the latter, coming across like a badly executed episode of 24 on LSD (which was, appropriately, Dick’s drug of choice).
It finds Nic Cage in Las Vegas once more as Cris Johnson, a guy whose ability to see a couple of minutes into his own future allows him to perform a cheesy magic act... and earn a few extra bucks on the blackjack tables.
"director Tamahori handles it all with the same delicacy as the time he dressed as a woman and got three years’ probation"
But his talent has drawn the attention of the casino bosses and – more sinisterly - hard-nosed FBI agent Cassie Ferris (Moore, hilariously miscast and taking everything far too seriously).
Why, asks a fellow agent in a brick-subtle piece of exposition, are they wasting time on this sideshow when Thomas Kretschmann and his band of foreign terrorists are about to obliterate L.A. with a nuclear bomb?
Because Cassie says so, all right? Isn’t it confusing enough that the bombers have no motive? Perhaps they’re fed up of Europeans being portrayed as villains in third-rate Hollywood action movies...
Whatever. With the Feds on his tail, Cris plays pool with his mate Peter Falk (who then disappears) before persuading mystery girl Liz (Biel) – whose destiny he believes he shares - to give him a ride out of town.
Once she feels certain that Cris is "not a psycho" – despite him being a walking Wikipedia of nerdy quotes, trivia and bad jokes - Liz agrees.
And what luck - his foresight goes much further whenever she’s around.
But Liz comes to rue her decision when she realises that her fate involves a paranoid psychic, over-zealous government agencies and the obliteration of California.
Cage’s tongue-in-cheek approach and the multiple outcomes of his character’s flash-forwards provide lots of fun.
But director Tamahori handles it all with the same delicacy as the time he dressed as a woman and got three years’ probation for soliciting sex from an undercover cop.
And his grasp of special effects – as foreshadowed by his conversion of James Bond into a PlayStation figure in
Die Another Day – is as feeble as the dialogue.
Honestly,
Next couldn’t be any dumber if Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were to show up in a van that looks like a dog.
Elliott Noble
