Not Worth ‘Knowing’

Cage Career Continues to Crumble

Wow, I think that just about sums it up.  Too bad I don’t pay my self to be clever and pithy.  In fact, I don’t pay myself at all, so stay your mouse gestures and hold on if you want to find out why after reading reviews that essentially said the same thing, I still forked over my ten dollars to the local multiplex and subjected myself this film.  The reason is…

Haha, now I’ve got you.  Director Alex Proyas is not exactly a slouch.  He’s responsible for such decent, maybe even good sci-fi films as I, Robot, Dark City, and The Crow, so you might say I was semi-interested when I heard about his new project Knowing.  I can say that probably every other human being became immediately less interested upon finding out the movie was to star Nicolas Cage, but more on that later.  So clearly it wasn’t tepid interest that drew me to this eschatological escapade, but rather a promise that this movie delivered fairly well, if not nearly often enough.

First off, any time anyone in this film attempts to speak, you will be squirming in your seat thinking, “Why, oh why is this screenwriter in the WGA and not me!”  It’s additionally sad considering the film toys around with several intriguing concepts, from the nature of determinism to the human psychology of knowing about an impending disaster.  However, the movie’s handling of these weighty topics comes across like the drunken ramblings of a freshman business major who just happened to be taking Philosophy 101 as an elective.  I don’t know which of the three credited screenwriters to blame, so I’ll just blame them all.

This movie really ends up being a D movie with B+ effect sequences.  So despite the inane screenplay, the reason I saw this movie was the promise of these juicy money-shots along with an equally brain squeezing “WTF” ending.  Thankfully the film delivers fully in these regards, including an almost genius single cut shot of a plane crash landing into a freeway, followed by Cage’s character running through the ensuing wreckage and burning people.  Furthermore, the film's ending is so WTF-ish, you may find yourself gagging on your popcorn in laughter (all I can say is thank goodness for orange soda…).

The film is clearly flawed, but more over, it's a prime example of amateur execution, and what happens when you produce a movie without a group of well trusted critics trying to hold you back and make you re-think what you are doing.  I could spend hours listing the flaws, but to give a taste of things:  the said plane crash which occurs is supposed to kill 81 people, as predicted by the movie’s “Bible Code meets The Number 23” cipher.  After the crash sequence, we hear on a news report that three other planes had crashed at that same time, which might help explain why so many people seemed to have survived Cage’s encounter.  But later on we learn that no, people had only died in the crash Cage had witnessed after all.  Why tell us about the other crashes then?  And so it goes for most of the movie as if the screenwriters we're battling with each other to tell their own version of the same story.

You know where this is going, but I will say if you feel the need to see this movie, I wouldn’t be as prone to beat some sense into you as I would if you tried to watch The Happening, so while you have been warned, this isn't the worst movie I've seen.  Although, and without being too spoiler-y, the movie has a certain smelly scent of L. Ron Hubbard about it which, whether in intentional or not, may be reason enough to avoid this film.  However, the real tragedy of this movie isn’t the plot, or the script, or even the sometimes questionable fire-effects compositing.  It’s the story of Nicolas Cage’s continued slide from triple A movie star to almost a good reason to avoid a film.  He’s about one more Bangkok Dangerous away from requiring a Mickey Rourke style rescue from obscurity. Let’s just hope the actor we learned to love so much in such movies as Moonstruck and The Rock will sign on to his next film knowing what he’s getting himself into.

Verdict: C, Meh