Is there anybody on the planet over age 11 who wants to be a superhero as much as Nicolas Cage, the guy who actually named one of his kids Kal-El?

Next, Cage's latest foray into saving the world, sees him take an interesting premise -- he's a B-list Las Vegas magician who supports himself on the side with his ability to see two minutes into the future (a killer app at the blackjack table) -- and squander it dodging bullets and punches.

It's an illogical movie that's essentially two long chase scenes and a short one.

Taken from a Philip K. Dick story (are there any left?) called The Golden Man, Next shows enough imagination early to be a poor-man's Memento -- which would have been far preferable to how it ends up.

Director Lee Tamahori uses herky-jerky, freight-train cuts of the sort they use on Lost to jump from "vision" to reality. And it lends a frantic urgency to the opening chase scene, in which Cris Johnson (Cage), a.k.a. magician Frank Cadillac, gets spotted winning big by casino security, foils a robbery, gets blamed for it instead, steals a car and eludes the Vegas police on a chase to the chop shop run by his pal Irv (the ageless Peter Falk).

So far, the movie sits in the outer orbit of credibility. But then an FBI agent (Julianne Moore) shows up. Seems has been scouting him and is convinced he's the key to finding a smuggled Russian nuclear device that's on its way to Southern California. These are confusing times indeed in Hollywood villain-land -- it's a Russian bomb, with Asian go-betweens and French (boo!) terrorists.

You'd think with the fate of millions on the line, she'd be focusing on the terrorists rather than finding the Amazing Kreskin, especially since a two-minute head-start on an exploding bomb is no great advantage. But, hey, if that doesn't make sense, it makes even less sense that the French terrorists would catch wind of the FBI's interest in this psychic and put their nuke plans on hold while they track Cris down and kill him. Just 'cause.

Meanwhile, Cris has inexplicably bolted on the FBI. Why won't he help them? Dunno. But he does meet the literal woman of his dreams (Jessica Biel) and convinces her to drive him cross-country. Let it be known that the eye-candy presence of Ms. Biel and the offhand way her clothes cling to her body was worth an extra half star in this review.

As for the two-minute warning, Tamahori soon runs out of anything interesting to do with it, and the movie becomes a series of that-didn't-actually-happen red-herrings. Characters are killed, then they're not. Major plot points happen, then they didn't. Cris' paradoxical ability to see the results of hypothetical events finally manifests itself in a silly Matrix-esque scene where he becomes dozens of himself, nearly all of which get killed off (but not really) along the way.

The ending is the culmination of these red-herrings. Without playing spoiler, it elicited about 80 decibels of groans and derisive laughs at the screening I attended.

And if nothing else, Next, a movie about a cheesy magician, does teach audiences the difference between a trick and a cheat.

(This film is rated PG)
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