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Next to nothing

French villainy, adaptations and nuking L.A.
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 1st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Synchronized with the audience. You, too, will keep looking at your watch in Next.
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Next

Directed by Lee Tamahori
With Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore, Jessica Biel and Peter Falk

Last week the London Guardian carried a story on the outrage felt in France about Frenchmen suddenly being used as Hollywood’s villains. The Guardian noted that Paris Match was particularly galled by this sudden shift from Gallic charm to Gallic harm in Tinseltown epics, writing that the French have “come to embody the depraved morals of Old Europe as evoked by George Bush.”
Considering that villainous roles have long been the province of the British, Guardian readers have sided with the French. “I think it’s a disgrace,” wrote one reader. “How is Jeremy Irons going to make ends meet?” No word has come from Slovakia, however, where the good citizens might actually welcome the focus falling on the French after Eli Roth’s hostile Hostel franchise has cast them as toothless psychopaths.
As misfortune would have it, I’d just read the article when I was forced by my contract to see Next, a third-rate thriller wherein a cabal of French terrorists, for reasons never revealed, are planning to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. If the detonation point is somewhere above the corner of Hollywood and Vine, can we blame them?
The rumored liberal credentials of the movie factories — a rhetorical aid beloved by the Fox populi and Talibangelists — collapse on this point, as surely the French are now paying for their haughty refusal to join America on its victorious march to Baghdad.
Where Hollywood is liberal, however, is in its handling of other people’s work. The posters for Next boast that it is a story from the same writer who gave us Blade Runner and Minority Report, which is to say Philip K. Dick. The great genre writer (who, like Raymond Chandler and Stanislaw Lem, is now more likely to be found on general literature shelves) wrote a story called The Golden Man about a prescient, golden-skinned mutant named Cris, who is surviving in a post-apocalyptic age.
Other than the character’s name, his foresight, and placing most of the action in modern-day Las Vegas (a city that advertises “End Times” in neon), there’s next to nothing connecting Dick’s tale with this wretched programmer.
In a further attempt at career suicide, Nicolas Cage has taken on the role of Cris, a two-bit Vegas warm-up act going by the stage name of Frank Cadillac. Because of his powers to see into the future (at least the next two minutes’ worth), Cris makes a credible fortune-teller.
His gifts have been noticed by the FBI, in particular Agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore in her own bout of sudden career death syndrome), who believes Cris is the key to tracking down the aforementioned motiveless French terrorists plotting to destroy L.A.
That the agent has time to take in Cris’ casino magic show, no small distance from the proposed ground zero, gives one little faith in the FBI’s diligence. Indeed, the first 20 minutes of this bilge have a number of FBI agents dropping everything and chasing after Cris to draft him into their program. The problem, of course, is that since Cris can see them coming minutes in advance, he always slips through their nets, until he winds up at the Cliffhanger Motel.
En route to this “cliffhanger,” Cris meets the woman of his dreams, an Amazonian named Liz (the pillow-lipped Jessica Biel), whom he drags along with him. Liz, of course, will be the key to capturing Cris, as the FBI knows about her, as do the nefarious frogs.
Will Cris’ leaving Las Vegas save L.A.? Will he be able to avert calamity and win his lady love back? Various unprintable responses come to mind.
Lee Tamahori’s clubfooted direction hardly helps. Tamahori obviously has a fascination for Stanley Kubrick, as he decorates Next with shots of Dr. Strangelove and references to A Clockwork Orange. If only he had studied how Kubrick was able to achieve these films.
The CGIs are almost as laughable as those employed in Cage’s last debacle, Ghost Rider. There is little in the way of suspense, though there are one or two intentionally comical moments that actually work. However, these are brief and to little avail.
The French have nothing to worry about here. Like such idiocies as “freedom fries,” Next will quickly vanish from sight.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (1/08/2007):

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