What is Nicolas Cage? Is he an indie darling, known for bringing unique performances to low budget films? Is he the world’s greatest action star? Is he a purveyor of b-movie schlock? Is he a highly attuned artist deeply committed to the craft of filmmaking? Is he a giant ham who mugs his way through movies without ever bothering to really act? Is he spectacular? Is he terrible?
I’ve watched a lot of Nic Cage movies, and the more I see of him the more I’m convinced the answer is “yes”, and Next is a fascinating data point in his long and storied filmography.
Next is the story of Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage), also known by his stage name of Frank Cadillac, a two bit stage magician and professional gambler living in Las Vegas. The Frank Cadillac show is lacking in stagecraft and charisma but makes up for it in impressive feats of mentalism. As a gambler though Cris has exceptional ability. Both are for the same reason. He can see every possible eventuality about his life exactly two minutes into his future. Two things stand to interrupt his routine though, persistent visions of meeting a woman in a diner (Jessica Biel) who will change his life, and an FBI Agent named Callie Ferris (Juilanne Moore) who is aware of Cris’s powers and wants to use them to stop a nuclear bomb from going off in Los Angeles.
Next is a film with rocks where its brains should be. It is not quite the stupidest movie I’ve seen for this project (that honor likely goes to a different supernatural thriller) but it’s also in no way a well made motion picture. The script is based on a Philip K Dick story called “The Golden Man” that has been heavily altered. Where “The Golden Man” is a dystopian thriller about a being with godlike powers, this is a paint-by-numbers action joint whose scenes barely coalesce. The performers in Next are all talented actors but they all feel like they’re reading lines off of cue cards with zero context. The action setpieces are reasonably well directed but they’re also augmented by some of the worst CGI I’ve seen this side of a PS2 game. It is firmly on the side of the Ridiculous Cage side of Cage’s career. What I find fascinating about Cage though is that while I can point to this as being a ridiculous and bad movie and can point to others that I love (for all kinds of different reasons) I find it very difficult to accurately draw the line of what separates a good Cage from a bad Cage.
Most everyone who loves movies likely has a Nic Cage movie they love, they also likely have something in mind when they think of him as a certain kind of harbinger of bad cinema. No one but the most craven hater dislikes Moonstruck (1987), for example, but I also cannot imagine anyone braindead enough to think of Next as high art. Finding the defining line is tricky though. It’s not that he’s good when he’s intense and bad when he’s more subdued (or vice versa). I find two of Cage’s most compelling performances to be Pig (2021) and Adaptation (2002), two films where he never crows or mugs or screams or nothing. Meantime Cage’s performances in schlock like Next and National Treasure (2004) are two hours of him squinting and speaking in a quiet monotone and they’re dull as shit. On the flip side Cage going full cuckoo bananas mode also results in good performances (Wild At Heart (1990), Raising Arizona (1987) among others) and bad ones (Vampire’s Kiss (1988), Renfield (2023) among others). How Cage performs isn’t what makes his performances good or bad.
The obvious reason why Next is a stupid movie isn’t necessarily Cage then, but everything surrounding him. Talented people get involved in bad projects all the time. Good directors with solid track records take big swings and sometimes those swings miss. Screenwriters with proven histories write duds. These things happen. After all the best baseball players in the world miss the ball a majority of the time. With Cage though there’s always this x factor, something polarizing about his very existence that turns films he’s in into either complete schlock or masterpieces. This is not the case with, say, Nicole Kidman, who is in some real masterpieces (To Die For (1995), Birth (2004) etc), some absolute drek (Bewitched (2005), Batman Forever (1995), etc) but also stars in unmemorable and but acceptable films quite often (Aquaman (2018), Cold Mountain (2003) etc). There’s no such thing as a forgettable Nicolas Cage performance. It’s all right at the top or right at the bottom.
This is the second 2007 Nicolas Cage movie I’ve watched this year, and I loved loved loved the last one. I can also see why people would hate it. Ghost Rider was over the top, profoundly silly, and like Next had a completely nonsensical plot. If the spectacle didn’t hit, you’d probably be saying the same things about Ghost Rider I’m saying about Next. By the exact same token, I can see a world where I’m saying the things I said about Ghost Rider about this film. If the action had been a little better directed, if the characters had just a little more weight, if the love story weren’t so profoundly unbelievable I can see this being a movie one hoots and hollers to while pumping one’s fist and eating popcorn. It’s not though, so it’s just stupid.
A characteristic often attributed to Cage is how intense he is. Even when he’s doing his more subdued and squinty performances there’s a kind of quiet but intense heat around him. Maybe it’s just because as his audience we’ve seen him go from 0-60 in half a second, and we know that for every quiet and measured line reading he might scream “he lives in a SHACK” at any moment. I think that intensity is the secret to understanding what Cage brings to any given movie. He commits, and he commits hard. In so doing he shows the audience as intensely as possible what kind of movie he’s in. Lines and situations that would be mildly clever become uproariously funny in Cage’s hands. Moderately raised emotions become hair raising when he’s the one delivering them. By the same token, when dialog isn’t meshing, when characters are unbelievable, and when story beats don’t make sense, Cage’s presence turns what might have been slightly bad into something immensely bad.
In golf, if you hit a drive powerful enough to make it onto the green in one shot, your aim needs to be incredibly accurate. Hook it or slice it even a little bit and that amount of power is going to send the ball into a very bad place indeed, but if you hit it dead on with that same amount of immense power and land on the green and you’re in hog heaven. That’s what Nicolas Cage is, a power drive, and everything surrounding him on any given movie set is the aim, the wind, and the spin on the ball. When everything lines up just right you get right on the green and it’s Face/Off (1997). Sometimes though a breeze picks up, the ball goes into the woods and it’s Next.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Most of the time I spent watching this I was thinking less about Next and more about the next movie I’d be watching.
Harold Number1: 0.35. Really hitting that sweet spot of “only creepy when you start thinking about it”
Other 2007 films visited this week
The Invisible: Remember Ghost (1990)? What if we did Ghost but with teens? And it was full of turn-of-the-century needle drops? Come for the spooky British Columbia action, stay for the scene where the criminal teen character goes to a club where they’re playing … And You Will Know Us by The Trail of Dead instead of, like, 50 Cent or something else that was actually being played in clubs in 2007. ★★★☆☆
Diggers: A surprisingly emotional little dramedy about a small town on Long Island that relied on small clam digging operations as its primary economic driver being killed by large dredging fisheries. Same death of small town America story that’s been told a million times, but this time with Ken Marino with a 70s dirtbag mustache on a boat. ★★★★☆
Snow Cake: Another quiet little drama with a massively uneven tone, primarily because of neurotypical Sigorney Weaver portraying an autistic woman. Thankfully despite being billed as a romance, the film’s lead (a tortured Alan Rickman) does not kiss her, instead he kisses the next door neighbor (Carrie-Ann Moss)2. Filmed and set in the tiny remote town of Wawa, Ontario, this feels like government mandated Canadian-Content but without any of the film’s leads actually being Canadian. Was Victor Garber unavailable? ★★☆☆☆
Next week: Spider-Man 3
An invention of my friend Paul Babinski, a “harold” is a measure of age appropriateness in cinematic couples. 1 harold is defined as the difference in age between Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude (1971). Anything over a quarter-harold is sus. Anything over a half-harold is creepy.
Harold number 0.40 (see above) veering into ‘yikes’ territory