How To Ruin An Almost Great Movie

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2014)

I had very low hopes for this movie . It stars Nicolas Cage and while some actors give the impression they swallowed a bottle of Scotch and turned up hoping for the best Cage gives the impression he's smoked a splif the size of a telegraph pole and wandered in from the set of his previous movie . He has struck the same single one note performance for over 25 years . It's time like this I regret criticising Paterson Joseph because using the cruel cliché of " He has the range of a water pistol " is ready made for Cage . On top of that I was also under the impression KNOWING would achieve all its spectacle via some very lazy and unconvincing CGI
Guess what ? To a very large degree this is how KNOWING plays out . Throw in some new age mystical nonsense about numerical codes and you wonder if conspiracy theorist David Icke might be making an appearance at some point . Saying all that KNOWING works far , far better than it has any right to . Indeed I found myself constantly surprised as to how compelling and involving the storyline was . It's a preposterous premise, one of being able to predict disasters via numerical codes but like so many fictional premises that are seemingly stupid if you're able to make things convincing then you're well on the way of spinning a great yarn
Director Alex Proyas helps the premise by directing in an understated and gloomy manner and letting the human elements of the story come through . He does have a slight problem with the spectacular disaster elements as in the aforementioned CGI looks far too much like CGI and one wonders if the film might have worked much better in curtailing the on screen carnage to a large extent . That said they still have an impact even if they're not as well realised as they might been . Perhaps it's because of the drama involved . After all how often do we see a movie hero save the day by averting a disaster . Here the future is written and no matter what he does Cage's protagonist can not change the course of destiny . Films with am impotent hero are few and far between so it's good to see an ineffectual protagonist for a change
The fate of humanity is at stake here and I was left biting my badly bitten finger nails as to how Nicky boy was going to save the world from an extinction event since he'd not been able to change fate at all . The build up to the last ten minutes of the movie is tense and suspenseful then proceeds to blow everything with a leftfield deux ex machina that has to be seen to be believed and must feature as one of the biggest cop outs I've ever seen in a movie . It wouldn't have been so bad if it was a very mediocre TVM production made for the Syfy Channel and after seeing too many cheat plot turns in 21st Century DOCTOR WHO I thought I'd experienced every unlikely plot turn ever made but here the rug is pulled out from under the audience and they fall so heavily it hurts . It's a great pity because the production team have gone out of their way to make a grim and great supernatural sci-fi thriller that would have bordered on great if they'd thought up a better ending