Terrible yet grotesquely endearing science fiction schlock

Rating: 3/10 (4 March 2012)

Well it was touch and go for a moment there. My interest in seeing Knowing stemmed from hearing how insanely wrong headed it was, but for quite a long while I just thought it was appealingly bad. It came through though. Actually for the first hour or so I was capably entertained, sure I was cringing or laughing at it but I wasn't bored. The plot is utter bunk, a religious parable uncomfortably wrapped in apocalyptic science fiction, its themes brayed with all the grace and subtlety of a naked street preacher farting into a loudspeaker (chaos vs. determinism, science vs. faith) and their resolutions as predictable as night and day, and the gears that move it asinine (a professor cracking a code with the powers of pattern recognition and perseverance that any serious researcher knows can only come of a whiskey fuelled all nighter), but it moves at a reasonable clip and is unusual enough to intrigue. It also packs a couple of surprisingly ballsy disaster set-pieces in the first half, pretty silly but more viscerally intense than expected. So despite few of the character decisions and none of the dialogue feeling natural, and despite the screen-writers omitting to even inject contrived likability to bring the characters above absolute baseline interest, for a while I was disappointedly thinking that Knowing was just a standard bit of entertaining crap. Then meteoric, the path gets clearer, the pace more obvious and the interest starts to burn away, preparing for the ending. And boy oh boy what an ending. Two pronged, both predictable, one kinda cool and one far less so, the good stuff is kept to less than a minute and the bad is a virtual revelation. Hilariously ill conceived crypto racist lunacy with lame CGI effects work and messy symbolism, its jaw dropping stuff and well worth the wait. And it isn't just terrible but sufficiently terrible that it casts revealing light back on everything wrong with the rest of the film, even things that weren't immediately apparent. Put simply, highly satisfactory. The side benefits are Nic Cage committed as ever doing a restless nervous weirdness schtick that rather convinces, Rose Byrne being lovely as ever and some lady I never even heard of before called Nadia Townsend who appears a couple of times and is also lovely. Oh, and it generally looks good and whatnot, professionally enough made. All in all I couldn't possibly recommend this one on any genuine level, but it's definitely worth a watch for people who like really bad films. 3/10 (but a happy 3/10).