Hello and welcome to another episode of Caged In. I am your host, your man with a scoop, your boy on the inside for your weekly scoop on Nick Cade. And what his films have to say about the world we are living in and the people that we are, most specifically the man that I am. And does this journey rock my brain or somehow make me smarter.
And next up on Caged In is next. So next we have next and next was released in 2007. I know nothing about this film like many of the films talks about on this podcast. And there is only one way I am going to find out what is about and as to watch it.
And that is to really ingest it with my notebook. And just find out what the hell is Caged The Director and all the other actors trying to tell us. If anything, I know nothing about next. I am looking forward to it.
I want to see what is next. But before we get into the bulk of the show and I actually watch this motherfucker. If you have a guest as by now I am actually venturing into these murky waters alone this week. I know we have a string of guests.
I say string of guests. It has been the same guest most weeks and that has been the lovely Bob from tonight with Bob and Joe. And if you are not listening to those guys, I don't know what you are doing with your life. Check them out.
I have recorded an episode of their podcast. I don't know when it will be up as soon as it is. Check out all the social media's. My handles are at Caged In Pardon.
I will shout out about that. But when it comes to this film, I have to visit my little friend who has been out in the wilderness hunting around for those anagrams. Yes, you got it guys. It's another little check in with my friend, the anagram hunter at W at Thomas underscore W underscore hunter on Twitter.
And he found a bit difficult this week trying to find an anagram for this film because next is only four letters long. Yeah, if you haven't figured that out already. But he found something very interesting. And maybe it's giving us a premonition of what is to come with this film.
He found that there is a simple anagram in next and that is 10. And the letter we have left over is X. And for those of you studious in Roman numerals or history in any way or just have a tattoo of your birthday. And you happen to be born in either November or yeah, born on the 10th.
The letter X is the Roman numeral for 10. And maybe in the stars, in the words, in the magic powers of anagrams, it is telling us that this film is a 10 out of 10. Maybe guys, maybe this will be our first on the Caged in podcast. The film on IMDB is rated 10 out of 10.
Maybe it's a pure fucking healthy tomato rotten tomatoes and scores a whopping 100% on Roger Eber gives this film four out of four. And that creates a million out of 100 because it's so fucking good. We can only hope that is the way. I know sometimes on this podcast we've been just bitterly disappointed by the fair we have been offered, but we always live in hope for better days.
And I'm a man who does that all the time, especially with comes to cage a man I've grown to love and a man who has had good luck this week in the fact that he is finally going to play Superman. Maybe not in the way that he wanted in the fantastic vision that Tim Burton had for the ill-fated Superman lives, but he is going to play Superman in voice form, I believe that's called voice acting in Teen Titans Go. He's not the only big name that will be in this. We also have Little Yachty.
Yes, you heard me right. Little Yachty. Little boat himself. For those of you who are not O'Fay with Mr.
Boat, he is a mumble rapper. He's going to like, things about things and enjoy a bit like that. He's not very, yeah, he's not in tune, but the kids seem to love it. I'm not a fan of Mr.
Boat stuff. Personally, I am yet to board that yacht and sail away into the sunset, but he is voicing the Green Lantern. And we can only say that this will be a bizarre and crazy film, and I'm going to have to watch it for this podcast, and I'm also going to have to watch Next. So there's only one thing left to do, and that's to get raging with Cage.
Let's talk about Next, baby. Let's talk about Nick. You see? Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that are sick.
Let's talk about Next. We're the one through God. Let's talk about Next on the Gaze in Park. Okay, so where the fuck do we start with Next?
This is not film. This is a TV show episode at best. It is not good. It is not good at all guys.
This was directed by Lee Tamahori, who had previously directed Triple X, the next level in 2005 and before that die another day. It was a terrible and unforgettable James Bond film and a terrible sequel in Triple X 2, the next level. And if I don't know in that I should have known what I had coming for me. The tagline for this film is, If you can see the future, you can save it.
And I feel like if I could have seen the future, I could have saved myself some fucking time. This is also based on a Philip K Dick short story called The Golden Man, and I was actually having a conversation the other day with a friend of the podcast, Bob, talking about the idea that where do you draw the line at stuff where it says like based upon something like how far removed can you go? How much of this is actually in Philip K Dick's original story and how much of this is just bullshit that has been thrown at the table. By it a lot of it, it seems like reading the trivia for this, a lot of it was just bullshit.
They threw at the wall and saw what was stuck and for me this pasta was very al dente because none of it fucking stuck. One of the things Nicholas Cage brought to the table for this film is that both his character should be a Vegas magician and that Jessica Bill's character should work as a teacher on Native American reservations. Neither of these really play that much into the plot, maybe more so his but her not a jot, nothing at all, no relevance to the plot whatsoever apart from just showing that she's a bit of a lovely lady. That is brought up in this film and then never brought it.
You would have thought that would have caused some type of jeopardy, the fact of like her being held hostage maybe with these children would bring jeopardy into the film but no nothing, it's just kind of brought up then dropped. Like I wish this film had been. So let's talk about what the fuck happens because I guess some of you might not have seen this film and you are very lucky people. If you haven't, I'm going to rattle through the kind of general plot of this film and then go back and talk about all the many problems I had with it.
So we are like introduced to Frank Cadillac at the beginning, a Vegas magician, which as soon as I saw on a close cage, it made me think this is the third time we have seen him in Las Vegas. First time would have been honeymoon in Vegas, the kind of caper. Yeah, like face of attraction. Is it fake attraction?
No, in decent proposal style like caper and then in the Oscar winning leaving Las Vegas and this time. Oh boy, it feels like he's been stuck in Vegas and has really washed up almost like his character seems being some kind of hack like a psychic magician and another little fun fact as well. If you have seen this film or if you haven't, the lady he says like your necklace is going to fall in three to one. That is actually played by his then wife Alice Kim Cage.
So he's even slipping her into the film because possibly they couldn't find any other motherfuckers to do it because this film was produced by Nicholas Cage. So not only has he got himself to blame that he's in this piece of shit, he's also got himself to blame because he actually had, it was instrumental in it actually getting made, which I am really upset about Nick. I got really excited as well when I saw the credits this film. I didn't get excited because the credits themselves because they look crap, they look like a kind of like B90s sub par frillo, almost like similar to like seven or fight club or something.
I was like this is 2007 guys, you can do better than this. The thing I got excited about is Peter Falk. I was like fucking out, Colombo is in this. This has got to be good.
Peter Falk, he's not my best name Tony, old shit is he? Well he fucking has. And I genuinely like the score, I really like the score, I'm like okay, this could be interesting. And then on the flip of the dive, a little less conversation about Elvis comes in on the oceans 11 now, I don't know what the fuck is going on.
So yeah, we see him like doing his magic tricks and Julianne Moore is in the crowd. She turns out to be an FBI agent and they are trying to get Chris Johnson, who's Nicklaus Cage's character, whose stage name is Frank Cadillac, which he explains later on the film is because it's two of his favorite things, Frankenstein and Cadillacs, so that's where he got the name from, which prompts Jessica Bill's character to call him an odd but charming gentleman. And that is not something that was scripted in the film. That is just her reflection on who Nicklaus Cage is.
He is a charming but odd guy. And that's what I kind of get the impression on a lot of the time watching these films. So yeah, he explains via voiceover that he has a superpower of such and it sounds pretty crap to begin with, but it's okay because they pretty much throw it out of the window and do whatever the fuck they want with it. And this superpower is the fact that he can see two minutes ahead of time into the future, but only in his own life apart from one time where he saw a woman in a diner and he doesn't know how far in the future that is.
So every day he has gone to that diner roughly around the time that he thinks it is just to make sure he does not miss her because he believes that destiny is calling and he is meant to meet her. So he explains how he gambles and like because he can like guess like what's going on and it happens to be this night that the casino catch on and they know who he is. They know he's trying to like he's got the show and they're after him and he manages to like stop shooting a load of people and stuff like that, but he's still kind of wrong place, wrong time kind of stuff. I don't know, it all just seems really contrived to me like, and I just feel like the premise is something you would get for like one episode of like a TV show I don't know what TV show that would be, or like I don't know it doesn't seem for a feature it just doesn't seem fleshed out and I have a massive problem with ending of this film, but we will get to that and we will talk about that in some depth because I was not so fucking I'm not sure if you can tell it my voice right now, but I was not happy bun he went I got to the end of this film.
I genuinely thought there was more. Yeah so the FBI are looking for him they get the casino security they're kind of like two steps behind him and then he goes back to Colombo and they end up going to play some Paul and then we get the first time where he kind of like we see like what he does with his mind fucking stuff like he well before that there's a really crap moment there's a fucking terrible moment where he's trying to evade the police and he envisioned what this film does is it shows you action and then zips back and then doesn't show you action like this is what could have happened like what could have happened is it's really fun and really exciting but what actually happened is boring because he's obviously saving his own life and stuff there and it just made me think that like this film this premise could have been so much more yet just falls really short and plays it safe and it's just boring I like and I think Nicholas Cage as well is the wrong guy for this part he is something about seeing him run and like the choice of outfits are peculiar and weird he wears this kind of tan leather jacket that just looks gross a great t-shirt which the continuity in this film is fucking off the chart bad at one moment he is sweat stain and then moments later he is dry as a bone but yeah he's playing Paul with Peter Falk and Julianne Moore's character the FBI agent Callie so Agent Callie she comes to see him and then kind of explains what they want and stuff like that and a SWAT team turn up and then poof in a split second that never happened he ran out the back door and it's just it's just like it uses the power to just give you lazy exposition basically people having conversations and it's this happens all the way throughout the film and there's no sense of jeopardy as well because you feel at any moment anything exciting that can happen it's just going to be pulled back and it'll be shown the bland boring version of it obviously the blindfold version is him being saved but it's just I felt really short changed guys like it's like the gimmick of seeing the future is just it's over and done with very very quickly we then see him the next day where he's evaded the cops and stuff like that and the FBI he has this vision of Jessica Bill in the diner but this time it's not the vision this happens to be the time coincidentally that she did turn up and he goes over and like it just like it has all these scenarios of him like and this is the first time as well when I got kind of confused about the the logistics of how his power actually worked because it seemed to show him all the possible outcomes that could happen if he acted differently and I just thought it would show him the future like of what he's actually going to do irregardless so yeah the use of the power in this is very strange and he seems to not use his power really for that good just for his own CD ends to kind of get what he wants in this instance just to try and like get in her company and get her to like get in a car with him because he says he's driving out to a certain point or I'm going that way I've got to stop off for two hours for my job because I work at a reservation and then that evening they're trying to get out of town but the bridges closed they've got a stay in a they've got a stay in a motel together and then what do you know that not knowing each other but like not even 24 hours they're in love they're in passion like they're in love with the they've made love and it's just like okay like I don't like really care about either of you characters really I don't like he's kind of like like he could have just said to the FBI he could have just had a conversation and said I actually have to be physically involved in something for the power to work like I can't just tell what's going to happen to you in the future in any given scenario it has to be my own life so the only way I'm going to find out where the terrorists are holding this bomb which is something I'm pretty sure told you about but I'm telling you I found out in the film terrorists are holding a bomb and the FBI wants him to help them get it and he like in the morning she's like given like an ultimatum by the FBI saying that they are going to like drug him we need you to drug him and they say they give her a very specific time window I was thinking like I was like taking myself out of the film because I'm surely no matter when she does it he is going to know he's going to know that two minutes into the future he's going to pass out and like yeah like he would have been dragged and also notice that like the villain there's one of the bad guys in this film there's a lady who's dressed exactly like Cage she has her hair pulled back which kind of resembles his kind of like bulging like skull it he's got going on it's kind of like grown out horrible like you may have seen the memes from this of him like with Eagle on his head and they are spot on I don't know what the fuck was going on with his hair it looked terrible and she has the same horrible scraped back hair and horrible terrible yellow even brown leather jacket on as well it's like what are the costume department doing like before you know what this looks pretty terrible on Nick Cage we'll give this to somebody else but yeah they give they say like she's got she's got to drug him and then he reveals his powers to Liz when she says to him I suppose the drug you but I can't like I'm so madly deeply in love with you I can't go through with it and he sets up a plan for them to get away he's like here's $10,000 like you run away it may be a week it may be a month but if you wait for me I will come back I will find you and his plan essentially is to just run downhill and and then like terrible CGI and shoes where Liz lets car roll down after him and like chains get ripped off and a load of scenery and like just gets ripped down with it like a water tower a load of logs and stuff like that and you see it barreling down in this kind of horrible CGI and like he's there kind of like an over age Neo like moving out of the way just at the last second looking like a kind of dad doing the electric alone and he gets caught by Julianne Morgz he has given the moment where he could save her life and get caught or he could let her get hit by some of these CGI logs and get away and he does the right thing and saves her but then he has taken to what can only be described as a clockwork orange style room where they like pull his eyelids open and make him watch the news just to find out what is going to happen in the future and they feel like this film is going to backtrack and say that apparently just to shoehorn in and make this film ever so possible they say that he can only tell the future longer than two minutes and happen to be anybody else if it relates to Liz which I found like really convenient and really annoying that that was like one of the plot points because it just seemed lazy and sloppy and it just felt like yeah like a get out of jail free car for them that they could just go oh this moves the plot along here by the way he can see her future as well so and there's no real time limit on it so it could be two days it could be four years it could be whenever and absolutely does he sees like the news for like two hours ahead and she is put on top of a building and it's blown up and the lady who plays the newscaster when this happens like the roving reporter is terrible I just can't I really can't explain how bad this acting is so wooden it's just like oh so somebody has just died yeah it happens to be this person it's it's awful it's some of the worst acting and I thought this film could not get any worse and like that that just did out like a sore thumb to me and then like it kind of barrels on and like he manages to then go to the roof like see into the future like see into the past all of a sudden or no see into the future again and it kind of goes into one of those like criminal minds like moments where they do like the cognitive interviews where like kind of like close their eyes and like it's shot like one of those moments as well where it's like him in the middle of the car park like envisioning like the truck pulling up and they're like what's the what's the number plate what's the number plate and then he manages to get the number plate of course he does and they track the terrorists to a shipping dock to a dock like a shipping container or like warehouse as always that's when they always that's like that should be the first place they go check out whenever there's bad guys in a film it's like where any warehouse is like the docks that's sure fine bet sure fine bet they're gonna be on a boat or they're gonna be like knocking about in a warehouse doing really shady things like they've probably got dog fighting going on probably got playing darts is like a legal betting on arm wrestling going on there's all sorts of drug smuggling there's like humans smuggling little there's bloody just get down to the docks get to the warehouses you'll get you get the bad guys in no time guys are but yeah he gets there and like he's going there isn't and there's nothing less exciting than watching the start of a film and like supposed to be like the the lead character just surrounded by tons of like Marines and him kind of weirdly telling them what to do like giving them like instructions and some kind of weird desert looking sooth saying twat just kind of like loading over them going up there back there up on the the roof there's a guy over there in that building a guy's gonna come out and I just don't know how he's he seems to be like omnipresent he seems to just know every scenario at any given moment and this is like this is shown when it kind of comes to like a showdown in the warehouse where I'm like shipping I don't even know where it is on a boat yes it's on a boat and he says you guys like check this floor I'll check all the others and they kind of try to do this like neat it's not neat they're a special effect where you get a multiple cage you get all these cages going around the ship checking every nook and cranny looking for Liz and the bad guys and they eventually get Liz and they are all like safe and then he says like they're like where's the bottom where's the bottom line have you found it and he's like oh it's too late and then the bomb detonates the boat explodes the city like explodes and then it cuts back to Nick Cage Jessica bill in bed that morning at the motel they stayed in the night before at which point I thought oh great like maybe they're gonna go through and show you what actually happened because he calls agent Callie and says okay I'll do it but I've got I've got stuff that like yeah I've got demands basically and I guess his demand is that Liz stay safe and I just felt really overwhelmed we have really overwhelmed with rage and I'm underwhelmed by the film because that ending is fucking awful I just don't know I just don't know what to say about this film in the fact that it just feels like it by the time it starts to get going it's over it's probably like 53 minutes into the film and we're still like we're still in the build up he hasn't even like joined the FBI and kind of trying to take down the like terrorists and this film is only an hour and a half long and it is it is really overwhelming and undercooked and like one of the things I read again on trivia on IMDb is at the cabin Cage tells a joke about Buddhist monk ordering a hot dog he actually ruins the joke when he messes up the punchline the joke is like what does a monk say when he orders a hot dog or something like that and the punchline he delivers is I'll have one with everything whereas the actual punchline to the joke is make me one with everything subtle but extremely different in meaning and that again feels like it sums up this film done subtly but different it could have been so much better like it's a cool premise that I did that someone can see two minutes into their own future and the kind of like moral quandaries with that and I kind of like like there is some good points that I touched upon in that like Nick Cage says at one point like he doesn't really want to help them because he knows that once he does he would just kind of become like a lab rat and made to do this all the time but I wish it had gone more into that like the moral ambiguity of what he does because a lot of stuff he does is like morally bad like the fact that he cheats gambling even though he kind of tries to defend it by saying he never bets against people he's always doing it against the house so one could argue that that is like stealing from greedy rich corporations and casinos and not other people But like, I don't know, there's other stuff he does. Like, there's a point as well, he just steals a car. I don't know why he does that because he obviously knows he's been followed and they will catch him if he just jumps in any old car.
And for someone who can see into the very near future, he can't seem to look into the deep future. But he's just running his life into the ground and fucking up majorly. So yeah, that is just like a real big problem with it. And like, around like one moment, it's a pretty cool moment really, like to show Liz about his power.
He like said, like he says what the next line is on the TV before it happens. And one of those is when he's up in through, there is a clip from the movie Dr. Strange Love or How I Learned to Stop Loving. I stopped worrying.
I love the bomb. Yeah, and he's leaving it on for the FBI to listen to. And the plot of Dr. Strange Love is about a rogue general attempting to start a nuclear holocaust with a way with nuke, an obvious reference.
As like I guess people probably know, or if you don't know, references like this in film are not accidental because obviously they have to pay for the licensing to use those clips from film. So yeah, but this again feels like something that I brought up in the Wicomann episode, referencing films that are far better than the film you are currently making just feels like an insult to the audience because you are reminding those people of how much better those films are that you are calling upon and referencing. And it's unfair to do to be honest because we want better than that. We don't want to be reminded of the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick and arguably his best film whilst we're watching a Turgid piece of shit which would have been well at place unlike CBS.
Yeah, I think that's a TV channel in America. I don't know if they buy shit at any American listeners. Feel free to let me know if that is the case. But yeah, that is this film.
Again, I can't just express how underwhelmed I feel. And I just felt like I rattled through that plot today and there's not really much else to go into apart from that. He's just like a really weird guy in this. I've covered the fact that he's dressed really well.
The haircut is very bizarre, very odd and very disturbing. He is, I don't know, he runs really weird. This is maybe the first time I've noticed it but he does not look like an action star. Maybe he's not meant to be.
I don't know. And I felt like even referencing other films I felt like the kind of nuclear bomb, like the big bomb inside of a city kind of thing just reminded me of The Rock which is a cage film that is much better than this. But more so reminded me of Face Off with the opening, or like the kind of, yeah, scene with Castatropane, the bomb in downtown LA and that kind of looming over the film for a bit. And this kind of like, yeah, reminded me of that and I was like, ah man, I would much prefer to be watching Face Off right now but instead I am watching next wishing if only I could have seen Into the Future so I didn't have to watch this film.
So we now know what I thought of this film. Let's have a little look if the internet agrees with me or a complete idiot, I think this is a masterpiece. Was the Anagram Hunters Anagram to remind you it was 10 and an X maybe prophesising that this film just like Cage can prophesise that this is a 10 out of 10 film. But I'm sorry to disappoint the prophet that is the Anagram Hunter but this film is a measly 6.2 out of 10 which I feel maybe not low enough.
Ron Tomatoes however is a lot more than keeping with my view on this film with a very piddly 28% and Metacritic giving it 42. I'm not sure if anyone is looking at the poster for this, it looks shit. The poster is, I will be posting it on social media because I have to let people know what I'm talking about but the poster for this is just fucking awful. For those of you who don't just listen to the podcast, don't keep up on social media.
It looks like the type of poster you would get for a blue crush, do you like that? Oh, surfing film, it's like a blue hue with cages like face sideways and then it fades off into black but Jessica Bill and Julianne Moore are there and then under Cage's chin and his body is the city and then just around the explosion. I know you shouldn't judge things by the cover but this is pretty why I never watched this film at the time when it was released because all that cover went nope, that is not for me, that looks absolutely dog shit and I feel like we may be in the like the filth, we may be in the swampy times. I hate to think that going forward the quality may decrease even further with Cage's films, we may have a few upticks but I feel like this may be this may be the decline guys and I'm worried, I'm worried for my future, I'm worried for yours, I genuinely don't know where this podcast is going to go but next week I know because I have seen this film that there is an uptick, there is a little bit of joy because I will be talking to Joe and Orphill of those movie guys to discuss national treasure to the book of secrets and oh boy I'm looking forward to it, I really enjoy the national treasure films, they're kind of a guilty pleasure of mine and yeah tune in then to hear what we have to say about that and let's ramble on and kind of see what the fuck is going on, I'm really looking forward to it hopefully you guys are but as ever I've been Patris Batsimus, I've been Cagedin, you've been rad, like subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Stitcher, listen on the website www.cagedinpodcast.com and social media if you fancy an Instagram Facebook and Twitter at CagedinPods, you've been rad, bye!