Makes the Book of Revelation Look Like A Weenie Roast!

Rating: 1/10 (21 March 2009)

Australian director Alex Proyas is best known for minor science fiction gems like "Dark City" and "The Crow" but worse known for cretinous big-budget baloney like "I, Robot." Proyas' predictable new Nicolas Cage science-fiction horror chiller "Knowing," is a lukewarm end of days prophecy potboiler that is appropriately enough scripted by the numbers. Truly, Cage needs to make a good movie. The Oscar winning Best Actor for "Leaving Las Vegas" hasn't made a memorable movie since the first "National Treasure" back in 2005, and "National Treasure" was no trove. Does anybody want to remember Cage's recent labors, "Lord of War," "The Weather Man," "World Trade Center," "The Wicker Man," "Ghost Rider," "Next" (nor entirely egregious), "National Treasure 2" and the wholly abominable "Bangkok Dangerous?" Cage's bit part as Fu Manchu in the faux trailer "Werewolf Women of the SS" in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino retro-misfire "Grindhouse" (2007) is about as good as it gets for the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola. Clearly, Cage either needs to hire a new agent or start looking before he leaps into some more half-baked hokum. "Knowing" qualifies as a poor man's "Close Encounters of a Third Kind" with a gloomy ending. Moreover, "Knowing" looks like Proyas put shrink-wrap on the camera lens. He lensed it with a video camera and the murky imagery detracts from the atmosphere instead of evokes it. Furthermore, the special effects look rather ersatz, especially the jetliner that crashes near the traffic jam while our hero is standing in awe.
In 1959, a Boston-area elementary school girl, Lucinda Embry (newcomer Lara Robinson), comes up with the bright idea of planting a time capsule with drawings in it that nobody will see for five decades. Little Lucinda is rather weird herself. She doesn't draw a picture. Instead, she scribbles down numbers ad nauseaum. Five decades elapse like yesterday and the school unearths the capsule and every student gets a drawing. One student, Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury of "Powder Blue"), the son of MIT astrophysicist professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), is handed a page filled with nothing but numbers. Dear old egg-headed dad gets soused one night and eyeballs the numerals and discovers to his surprise that the number groupings are the days when disasters occurred or may occur. Suddenly, stealthy, white-haired guys in long dark coats start showing up and giving Caleb little black rocks. By the way, Caleb has a hearing problem and his hearing device acts up. One night, a 'whisper person' materializes in Caleb's upstairs bedroom and gives him a Dantesque vision of a forest ablaze with wildlife futilely trying to escape the conflagration. Meanwhile, we learn that John's wife died in a motel fire out west while he was blowing leaves off his front yard. Now, John believes that life constitutes little more than a meaningless series of random acts, until he scrutinizes those numbers and embarks on a crusade to save the country.
This thinly-plotted science fiction hokum boasts zero suspense until John's younger sister Gracie (newcomer Natalie Townsend) sneaks up behind him while he is pondering the numbers and jostles his chair. This qualifies as the most frightening moment in this 122-minute movie. Meanwhile, John's skeptical MIT colleague, Phil Beckman (Ben Mendelsohn of "The New World"), is worried about John's obsession with these figures. John explains to an incredulous Phil that the numbers correspond to the dates, sites and death tolls of every disaster in that period. Finally, Phil takes John seriously after our hero witnesses a jetliner crash when he is trapped in traffic gridlock. John realizes now that the extra numbers that he couldn't explain were GPS tracking statistics. Eventually, John tracks down Lucinda's daughter, Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne of Fox TV's "Damages"), and they become friends. Diana takes John to a ramshackle house in the woods where her mother Lucinda spent her last days, and John uncovers a revelation under her bed that staggers his mind and turns Diana as pale as a cadaver. They realize that the coming events make the book of Revelation look like a weenie roast.
Sadly, the special effects are substandard. The scene where the jetliner crashes looks as bogus as is the New York City subway accident where hundreds of people die when a train derails and collides with another train. The downtime between John's discoveries will have you yawning and looking at your watch. Cage does a good job of going berserk along with everybody else around him, but the story is downright preposterous. Moreover, from the gas prices posted at the service stations, "Knowing" was made before the plunge in gas prices so the studio must have been shuffling this mishmash from one focus group to another to figure out an appropriate ending. Proyas doesn't generate the kind of ominous dread that the "Final Destination" movies furnish and the finale is depressing. Call it Crappy Encounters of a Close Kind and save your money!