Faith off

Another hot day, plus not being able to be with my dad on Father's Day meant I headed over to the budget theater to relax. This time it was for Nicholas Cage's latest, Knowing.

Knowing made it onto my top 30 for '09 list back in December, albeit with some caveats. The premise of this movie sounded interesting; a man comes across a list of numbers found in a time capsule that list the date and number of casualities for every single disaster that's occurred and some that have yet to happen. However, given Cage's track record of films I fully understood that the movie could easily be complete junk. Sadly, just as the tragedies predicted on that sheet came true, so did my worries for this film.

For the most part, the film works early on. I like the original premise, even if they have Cage figure out the meaning of the numbers too quickly. I also like the scenes involving Cage's efforts to stop the upcoming disasters. One scene involves a plane crash and the other involves a subway derailment. Both scenes are harrowing in their realism. Director Alex Proyas does not pull any punches in depicting the destruction of the actual events nor the frightening moments in the immediate aftermath. With the way these scenes were done, I was intriqued by where the film was headed.

Sadly, the film takes a massive detour, turning this unique premise into a preachy mess related to an impending apocalypse. We get the whole man of science/man of faith debate thrown into the film haphazardly. Anyone that has watched Lost, knows that this dichotomy can be done so much better. None of it seems authentic here, making the film's conclusion all the more hokey.

The film also spends a lot of time with the child characters. Issues relating to them being the "chosen ones" are not fully explained. Instead, Knowing presents them in the same unique/spooky/gifted/bedeviled/creepy way that we've seen in way too many films in recent years. Ever since Haley Joel Osment's performance in The Sixth Sense we've seen this glut of troubled/special children in thrillers. I am hereby calling for an end to this plot point. It's become hackneyed and tired and most kid actors can't pull it off effectively.

I really wanted to like this film, but as it went further and further away from the original premise I wondered why they were making these decisions. It was as if they didn't have any faith in their story and felt they needed to gin it up by making it some end of the world morality tale. It basically combines The Number 23 with The Day The Earth Stood Still, which is not a combination you want to have.

They say knowing is half the battle and in this case Knowing only won half the battle. The other half, which involves executing on the original premise is where this film was lost. Chalk this up as another terrible movie for Nic Cage. With his track record of batting .500, his next film will no dobut be fantastic. As for this one, unless you want to marvel as the visual beauty of horrible tragedies on your HDTV, there's no need to check out Knowing. Grade: C-