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Common Sense Note

Parents need to know that, like most action thrillers, this movie has several violent scenes: An international terror syndicate is responsible for blowing up a victim, launching a nuclear missile, and slitting the throat of anyone in their way. Nicolas Cage's character gets involved in several fights, and the FBI and the terrorists display enough ammo to fill the national armory. While there's no real gore (or blood, for that matter), the images are still disturbing. There's only one love scene, but there's a lengthy scene preceding it with Jessica Biel wrapped in a towel. Thanks to Biel's popularity and Cage's action cred, expect teens to want to see it, even though it's not being marketed as a teen film.

Families can talk about other time-bending movies and TV shows. Are movies that play with time cool or frustrating? If you could look into the future, would you use the information to make money or stop crime? Families can also discuss why so many thrillers feature nuclear terrorist threats. Is that the ultimate danger to today's society? What other hazards can you think of? And why are terrorists almost always portrayed as foreign agents?

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Common Sense Review

Reviewed By: Sandie Angulo Chen

Even with its twist ending (don't worry -- no spoilers here!), veteran action director Lee Tamahori's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story "The Golden Man" is just another predictable sci-fi thriller headlined by marquee actors.

Hollywood's hardest-working Oscar winner -- Nicolas Cage, in a ridiculous hairstyle that nearly rivals Tom Hanks' Da Vinci Code 'do -- plays Cris Johnson, aka "Frank Cadillac," a small-time Vegas magician. But Cris' on-stage guesses are no act: He can miraculously see exactly two minutes into the future. Not two hours or two days, two minutes -- about enough time for most of us to figure out whether the light's going to turn red or who got booted from American Idol before everyone else.

Cris uses his unusual skill to wow his fans, win big at Black Jack, and pique the interest of ambitious FBI agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore), who needs immediate help stopping a group of foreign "bad guys" from detonating a nuclear device on American soil.

If that doesn't sound 24 enough -- think of Cris as a kinder, gentler, slightly more clairvoyant version of Jack Bauer (minus the guns) -- there's also a romance thrown into the mix. Jessica Biel, whose beauty is quite riveting (see The Illusionist), co-stars as Liz, whose face showed in Cris' visions much more than two minutes early.

Cris would rather meet-cute with Liz than help the FBI, but when the French-accented terrorists kidnap his new girl, he has no choice but to help. Callie actually mutters the superhero-defining words "With freedom comes responsibility."

Some of the movie's fast-forward sequences are funny and impressive, but a few are plain ridiculous. (At a public screening, the occasional applause and cheers were tempered by loud cries of "Whaaat?" toward the end.) And while the "big twist" finale is entertaining, it's not all that shocking -- nor particularly satisfying, which pretty much sums up NEXT.

Families with older teens who dig sci-fi thrillers will also enjoy these other films based on Dick stories: Minority Report, Total Recall, and Blade Runner.

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