Do the numbers add up? Well, no, they really don't.

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2009)

Teetering between genuinely thought-provoking science-fiction and largely innocuous disaster movie pomp and circumstance, Knowing, which comes from director Alex Proyas (The Crow and I, Robot) is an irksome and mostly disjointed affair. Dealing with characters, situations and plot lines that go a little beyond the usual scope of cinema while offering viewers an experience with the potential to thrill and surprise, this outing for Proyas inevitably crumbles under the weight of its own ambition which is disappointing. Indeed, while the script for the most part portrays its lead character in shades of sheer lunacy and insanity, the movie as a whole can be seen as being just as schizophrenic, if not more-so. It's indulgent, overlong and padded to the brim with needless contrivances, puzzling u-turns and banal digressions that have little or nothing to do with the central theme at hand. The result is a feature that sporadically entertains and even raises interesting questions and ideas from time to time, yet too often falls victim to its own verbose, directionless prophecy babble to the extent where all focus and engagement is lost. Knowing certainly has potential, and this is evident in several startling scenes visceral and sensual, but such potential is never truly tapped or expanded upon. So the viewer is left to squander amongst the ruins of half-finished ideas, disjointed themes and a lacklustre, unconvincing narrative that binds it all together with a sense of bemusement at everything that transpires—sure, it's pretty unnerving and it's definitely got a sense of audacity about it that Nicholas Cage seems to seep out of everything he touches these days, but as a whole is it any good? Do the numbers add up? Well, no, they really don't.
For all intents and purposes, despite the movie's attempts to fool the viewer during the first two acts, Knowing is first and foremost a disaster movie. Taking place in our current day, some six months down the line after a astrophysicist named John (Nicholas Cage) comes into possession of a series of numbers written down and placed in a time capsule by a crazy kid fifty years prior which predict disasters from that date onwards, Knowing is a disaster movie in every sense. What perhaps could have made the feature a little more convincing and interesting on a visceral or cerebral level however was if it spent as much time expanding upon the ideas of determinism, causality and the eventual allegorical outcome that permeates the whole of the film in retrospect. Instead however, much of the movie resorts to mundane fabrications set up for the sake of giving the audience those big disaster movie CG shots—train wrecks, plane crashes, you know what the deal is. To be fair, Knowing pulls off these moments as good as anything else out there today, but in the end they all feel like inconsequential distractions or derailments from what the script is really trying to say.
Taking the theme of predestination and running with it to the extent where Stan Lee's infamous "with great power comes great responsibility" came running through my head, the character of John reveals why Nicholas Cage was picked for the job. For the better part of the middle section, John takes it upon himself to try and solve this mystery of numbers predicting dates, numbers of people dead and locations in order to prevent the inevitable. At one point he even estimates that had he been granted this "window into the future" sooner, he could have prevented his wife's death (and in turn also killed one of the movie's biggest clichés next to the distant family, lone, gifted son and the mysterious Strangers in the Woods) without giving one second of thought to the complete stupidity of such a concept and irrevocable implications involved with determinism that he flaunts so glibly during the movie's opening act. Sure, you can't blame a guy for getting a little crazy when faced with a possible End-of-the-World scenario, but at the same time you also have to seriously question the plausibility to all that goes on in the twisted world of Knowing when it so obviously and excessively wants you to believe in its tale.
The problem however, is that the script is a meandering mess devoid of any sense of compelling pace, or interesting elaboration on anything that it raises in the wreckage that it so ceaselessly creates. The resulting world isn't one that feels like ours, and so the whole disaster element of the movie feels contrived and irrelevant. Furthermore, there isn't much else to say for the ensemble of performances here outside of the fact that they downright stink. Cage, who to be fair isn't known for his humanist shades, is wooden and largely uninteresting as the movie's protagonist-trying-to-save-the-day-whilst-being-a-single-dad cutout. His co-stars are just as blasé and awkward, echoing last year's similar—but much more effective and stylistically distant—disaster romp The Happening in a way that only goes to further the movie's schizophrenic, somewhat alien nature. So in the end we come down to the most tired and truest of cinematic criticisms—if I can't relate to these people, if I can't believe in their plight then what else do I have but some nice looking photographs and a loose form of narrative tying it all together? For some, this will be enough. The fact that the movie takes the whole disaster thing and runs with it to the very end in a coherent fashion is one of the only saving graces here, yet science fiction fans and people just a little tired of these overlong, over-produced distractions will find no real joy here.

A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)