A horribly unsubtle movie

Rating: 3/10 (21 June 2009)

Knowing is as subtle as '80s Hard Rock.
From the first scene you know it. There's the little Cassandra character who is a pale, nearly autistic creepy little girl with the ominous stare all the time who writes down a chaos of numbers while in trance. The movie continues along these lines.
Nic Cage's character is basically Mel Gibson's (not too great) character from Signs. He's a broody widower, who lives with his half-deaf son in a creepy horror mansion somewhere outside of Boston. His son gets the number chaos from a time capsule at school and Cage somehow finds the date of 09/11/01 in there. The pale standing-around-people from Dark City are back as well.
All in all this movie is just a collage of two dozens movies, most of them not really classics to begin with. Not a single figment of it is original.
And Nicolas Cage must finally be considered to be amongst the worst actors that are A-list in Hollywood. His performance in this is astonishingly bad at times and barely adequate at best. It doesn't help, that his character is clownshoes. Only trumped by the female sidekick character who got some of the worst writing since the 1950s.
There is a lot of CGI in there. Every single scene has been visually enhanced. Some of it looks better, some worse. All looks fake. There are two CGI disaster sequences that are done pretty well. You see they're 100% computer generated, but they look very convincing indeed.
3/10, without the disaster scenes it'd be 2/10.