Very Cool!!!

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

A clairvoyant Las Vegas magician is tracked down by an FBI agent who believes his supernatural powers and wants to use them to foil an nuclear terrorist attack in LA. The weirdness and absurdity start with this brief definition of the scenario: a nuclear attack is imminent and instead of narrowing down on the threat with all of its resources, FBI spares a good deal of his task force to go after a person whose contribution to the solution is uncertain. The magician knows FBI looks for him for help to save the lives of some 8 million people, but tries to evade them for some reason which is not clear. If this doesn't sound weird enough the bad guys also go after the magician just because FBI looks for him but without really knowing why they need to. Indeed, the plot gives no clue for what the bad guys are up to, which depicts them all as cartoonish villains. Then, Jessica Beal joins in as the beautiful face of a romantic subplot which really doesn't add much to the story. J. Beal is gorgeous to watch but way too young and fresh to make us believe that she can't do better than a middle age man with a cheaply died, scruffy and thinning hair. A movie, especially one with some flavor of metaphysics and fantasy is for entertainment purposes and cannot be expected to follow the reality. However, the plot has to be coherent even in a fantasy world to sustain the attention of the audience. Nothing makes sense in this mess of a story. The action scenes are pretty typical with a cat and mouse game inside a warehouse, guns spitting fire in dust and smoke, dead people falling off rooftops and stairs, etc. Others involving a car, rocks, debris and logs tumbling down from hilltops look nothing more than a cheap, blatant computer animation even to an untrained eye. The pace is good but the flat and unconvincing acting matches well to the ludicrous plot and the ending is utterly childish and lame.

A very generic film for such an interesting concept. I think this film was put out around the time when people still considered Nick Cage action films a worthwhile watch. Whatever.

This is possibly one of the dumbest most contrived movie plots I have ever seen... and that's coming from a guy that binge-watches shark-movies on a regular basis.All they had for this one was the idea of the two minutes of "clairvoyance". Then I guess they realized that wasn't enough to make a movie out of so... well they just threw in the most generic plot imaginable... and a nuke, I'm pretty sure there might have been a nuke involved. Not that you'd know or care by the time you finished watching the movie.The most original part was the end credits. I won't spoil what made them interesting though, something has to keep some mystery.

Now Nicolas Cage was once seen as a fine actor, even winning awards and many people wanting him to star in their films. But now although he is wanted for peoples films, it does seem that around the time he did this movie, only bad movies wanted him, or he was choosing them himself. This is an example of bad acting, and how a movie suffers because of it and coupled with bad directing and writing too, you fast come to realise that some movies just aren't that well made.It kind of made me a little sad that Paramount ploughed $70 million dollars into this movie when it quite obviously could have been used on something much more thought provoking. Now don't get me wrong this film has it's moments and the premise isn't so bad, a guy can see two minutes into the future meaning he basically can just get away from everyone who ever is after him and also run an albeit poor magic show. The story plays out like any other typical movie plot, well maybe not all of it but the set up is anyway, the ending is different I'll give it that, but also kind of annoying too.Cage isn't the only person here giving nothing to their character, Julianne Moore is poor too and when the actors so highly regarded are not good at what they do, you know this movie is hazardous. Jessica Biel joins the poor acting parade and along with Cage makes no effort to create any chemistry or feeling and that by the end you feel there is nowhere for this movie to go. Lee Tamahori is the director and it is just not good whatsoever, not only does he make the poor acting look even worse, he also just couldn't make the Sci- Fi like plot exciting.Now I'm not going to sit here and say for 96 minutes I watched a movie that nearly killed me(maybe shouldn't have used the word hazardous), but this movie isn't one that is very enjoyable. It has it's moments of stunts, thrills and car chases plus a few gun battles to spice things up, but there in lies the problem. The movie could have been mindful and really struck a cord about what time means to people, what could we do with Cage's power in which we only really see showcased within the first 30 minutes in a way that looks cool.I do want to think of some positives, after all I stuck by this and said it was a bad movie and not an awful one, oh I am nice. The score isn't half bad, shame it had to be used on this movie but Mark Isham creates a nice blend of instruments to make some scenes kind of thrilling. I also felt the camera angles were nice, it followed the action nicely and yet again maybe made them slightly better, David Tattersall making a good job out of a bad movie.Overall this is one movie I would recommend you miss, now of course you get people who enjoy this kind of stuff and fair enough, but just watch this carefully and tell me it isn't lazy work. I do hope one day I can see Nicolas Cage fine again, I want to see every actor do well and every film as well but Cage at this stage of his career seems lost, it's as if he wants to make bad movies and really working with Tamahori turned out to be a bad decision.