I recently rented and watched that horrible Nicholas Cage flick Next. Whew, was it bad. In addition to being not worth watching, there was a scene at the end that I just didn’t understand.

So Nic Cage’s character can see into the future. There’s a clever scene where he’s walking through a gunfight. He’s just strolling. Since he can see the future, he’s directing his government official protectors where people are coming from and dodging bullets and whatnot. Eventually his group walks its way into some industrial plant (cliche) and they decide to stop and clear the area. First, they make it sound like it’s imperative. Never mind the fact that they just walked through half the factory without ever stopping to clear a room. Besides, they’re chasing someone with a hostage. Why stop now? Second, Nic Cage tells his party to clear the current level. He’s going to take all of the other levels using his special see-into-the-future power. Now it’s nice and ridiculous that he’s looking into all of the future possibilities at once but it’s even more ridiculous that he wouldn’t just go ahead and clear the current floor. Instead, the team goes off and leaves him alone while they go clear a room that Cage could have just easily have done with the rest.

This culminates in the black guy dying. He gets shot during the government team sweep. A sweep that was entirely pointless to the film. I mean, black guys always die first in movies. It’s like a tradition, I guess. But Next went out of its way to kill the black character. It had to stop the action just to pursue this pointless scene and even had to break its own skewed internal logic to make it happen.

This is almost as egregious as Julianne Moore’s exceptionally stiff and uninteresting acting.