Cage saves the day, barely

Rating: 5/10 (25 March 2009)

Nicolas Cage's strong on screen charisma and genuineness makes the actor an archetypal lead for any film that requires saving the world from an impending apocalypse, and it's further evidenced in the otherwise disappointing "Knowing." Like an inelegant amalgam of an M. Night Shyamalan movie and a Fundamentalist direct-to-video, Alex Proyas' end-of-the-world sci-fi intriguingly pitches the idea of determinism-versus-randomness at the outset only to devolve into a cacophonous pile of genre clichés.
MIT astrophysics professor and preacher's kid John Koestler (Cage) has long abandoned his faith since his wife died a year earlier, finding solace in his firmly held belief that everything is an arbitrary result of complex chemical and physical reactions. However, on the 50th anniversary of his son's (Chandler Canterbury) school, each student is given a piece of paper that was buried in the ground by a group of schoolchildren in 1959, wherein drawn are the future as they envision it. John's son receives Lucinda Embry's (Lara Robinson) paper scribbled with seemingly random numbers, but as John closely inspects it, he realizes that these numbers are the dates of the major tragedies to have happened in the last five decades, and three more are about to take place.
As he has demonstrated most recently in "I, Robot" Proyas is a proficient director of mood and visual exhibition, yet just as with the the Will Smith-starrer, "Knowing"'s promising ideas never translates into a lucid unit, tripping into a second act filled with heavy-handed religious undertones and a grab-bag of copiously borrowed scenes from its predecessors, culminating in an oh-so hackneyed Creationist tableau. "Knowing"'s overt portentousness dilutes whatever arresting display it has, though it's all made at least mildly tolerable by the charismatic Cage who finds himself the quintessential guardian of the world that how apt, then, he almost becomes the savior of a possibly absolute schlock.