Next: Movie Review, DVD Review, HD DVD Review (2007)

Not one but three actors squander their talent and go for the paycheck in the new Lee Tamahori movie, "Next." One of them is an Academy Award winner, another has been nominated four times for an Academy Award, and the other, if she continues down this road of nonsense and rot, can kiss her own chances at ever being considered goodbye.

The actors in question are Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel, all of whom presumably read the screenplay for "Next," and who then decided that this indeed was the right choice to move their careers forward.

Forward into what is the question, but it's tough to work up the steam to figure out an answer — or to wonder what they were thinking when they signed onto the project.

Loosely based on Philip K. Dick's 1954 short story "The Golden Man," this movie version is just plain stupid, served with a side of stupid. It stars Cage as Cris Johnson, a third-rate Las Vegas magician whose dyed hair plugs have created such a distracting bird's nest of a 'do (he looks like a strung-out version of Tom Hanks in "The Da Vinci Code"), his stage name really shouldn't be Frank Cadillac, as it is in the movie, but Mullet the Magician.

Looking gaunt and thin, his sunken eyes burning holes into the screen, Cage's Johnson is considered, by some, to be quite a catch.

With his clairvoyant ability to see two minutes into the future, he attracts the attention of area casinos, which are tired of his uncanny winning streak, as well as by the government, with grim FBI agent Callie Ferris (Moore) determined to enlist his help to keep a group of Russians from blowing up Los Angeles with a stolen nuclear bomb.

There are a few problems with this. First, why do these Russians want to blow up Los Angeles? Did one of them have their script denied? Their hopes dashed? Never explained. Second, is the U.S. government really so weak on intelligence that they would attend Johnson's magic shows, spend time deducing over cocktails that he has "special powers," and then spend additional time tracking him down, because, hey, who better to turn to for help in a time of national crisis than a clairvoyant?

Okay, so it's best not to answer that last question. Still, the movie wobbles forward, with Biel showing up as Johnson's love interest, who becomes kidnapped by the Russians and thus is endangered in ways that only Johnson can solve. As drama and chaos bloom around them, the script lurches illogically through the dull car chases and clumsy gunfights until it literally detonates with one of the worst, most incomplete endings in recent movie history.

Grade: D