Movie Reviews

KNOWING

Here are what some top movie critics have to say about this particular movie.

"March 21, 2009 | If Alex Proyas' "Knowing" were reasonably entertaining -- instead of just dour, pointless and tedious -- it would be a camp classic. My favorite moment is the one in which Nicolas Cage, as an MIT professor who's acquired a special sheet of paper that gives him the inside scoop on upcoming dire catastrophes, rings his estranged parents to warn them of impending global doom. He urges them to head underground: "The basement, the sewers, the T!" he offers helpfully.

Although I've ridden Boston's subway system many times and can vouch for its safety and relative efficiency, I wouldn't recommend it as a place to hide from the apocalypse. But according to the logic of "Knowing," well, why not? This is also a movie in which the Angel of Doom shows up in a black raincoat that looks as if it came from the sale rack at Brooks Brothers. (With his bleached-blond quiff, he also looks like Spike, from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," except with zero sexual charisma.)

No fewer than five people are credited with having worked on the script of "Knowing," though if it were left to me to guess, I would have put that number closer to 17. There's a lot going on in "Knowing," and important themes crisscross and swerve with abandon: Cage's character, John, has recently been widowed, and he and his son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), are still mourning her loss. We learn early on that John, a man of science, doesn't believe in heaven, or even in -- gasp! -- God. Then a page full of mysterious numbers falls into his possession: A troubled little girl scrawled them out in 1959; they've been locked away in a time capsule ever since. When John looks carefully at the numbers, he notes a terrible sense of logic to them: They make specific references to the dates of past disasters -- 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, any number of plane crashes and train derailments -- and John fears they may point to future catastrophes as well. Can he stop these tragedies? Will he regain his faith? And will he meet a cute babe -- one played by Rose Byrne -- in the interim?

You probably already know the answer to at least one of those questions. As for the others, Proyas ("I, Robot") makes sure we get to see a good selection of massive disasters, including a plane crash in which victims, burning to death, scream in pain. There's also a wildfire in which assorted moose, deer and bears -- also in flames, and clearly suffering -- stampede in fear. But hey, it's all CGI, so who cares? And it's all in the service of a greater idea: We must have Faith, with a capital F.

Cage used to be a pretty consistently terrific actor, and often he's been good even in the dumb, schlocky movies he's been choosing over the past 10 years or so. But in "Knowing," he mostly just stumbles around with his mouth hanging open, dumbstruck by his realization that he knows very little about the universe and, worse yet, has almost no control over it. Thus, he must put his faith in a power greater than his own. I hope that doesn't mean his agent."

By : Stephanie Zacharek

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Knowing is a portentous numerological global-warming-to-the-nth-power thriller, in which Nicolas Cage plays an MIT professor who figures out that The End is near. If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise. At least Shyamalan, in his dud The Happening, is a compulsive audience-gooser, whereas Alex Proyas (The Crow), the director of Knowing, has no idea what to do between calamitous set pieces. There's one terrifying moment (it's featured in the television promos), where a jetliner comes hurtling out of a stormy sky with a nightmare suddenness that is up close and vivid. But Cage, gaunt and haunted (or maybe just vacant), spends far too much time doing his antsy-perturbed thing as he tries to decipher a sheet of numerals dug up from a time capsule — a code that foretells every global disaster of the past 50 years, as well as a few that have yet to happen.

As he ponders and marinates, we have time to consider questions like: Why, in the midst of this vaguely millennial muddle, does Cage's prof live in a mansion that's lit like the setting for a Disney ghost story? And what are those nicely attired blond alien attachés, who could be refugees from a Depeche Mode video, up to? You may also wonder what Cage, at this point in his career, does to psych himself up for a scene in which he's driving and screaming lines like, ''We have to go where the numbers want us to go!'' Knowing is a trash-compactor hodgepodge of Deep Impact, The Number 23, Close Encounters, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Too often, though, it's the movie that stands still, as it counts down to one of those ''mind-blowing'' digital cataclysms that dissipates the moment you walk up the aisle

By : Owen Gleiberman

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UH-UH. Non. Nein. Neg ative. Sept. 11 is not to be used as the setup for a cheesy disaster prophecy flick.

In the fiercely ridiculous "Knowing," Nicolas Cage plays John, a widowed MIT professor looking at a page of random digits when the series 91101 leaps out at him. It's followed by the number of people killed that day. Other disasters listed include 041995, for the Oklahoma City bombing, and 022307, the day "The Number 23" was released.

The numerals, dropped into a time capsule by a disturbed little girl 50 years ago, include the date, location and death toll of every natural disaster in that period, plus a few into the future. The next one's here, so naturally John zips from Boston to Manhattan by the most logical method: the Brooklyn Bridge. He knows the disaster could be anything including a plane crashing on that spot, yet he thinks he has a scientific, MIT-ish method for foiling danger: to stand around looking for suspicious characters. Soon he's randomly chasing a guy whose crime appears to be wearing a jacket.

John's an agnostic who doesn't believe life has any meaning. "I think s - - t just happens," he says. I can vouch for that, having seen "National Treasure 2," but someone is sure helping to make it happen. Like Cage, who sticks to his habit of shouting punch lines, like a 16-year-old at a midnight screening of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." (Example: "I'm just trying to understand why THIS IS SAYING THEY WILL!")

John, in world-saving mode, winds up in the middle of more disaster areas than Anderson Cooper. Did you know that when a plane slams into the ground at high velocity, everyone on it initially survives? Yep, apparently they all get out and run around yelping as they burn. Now I know why the stuntmen call these scenes "fire gags."

Amid chatter about global warming, the sinister doings of whispery figures pursuing John's son, and the secrets known only by the daughter (Rose Byrne) of the girl who originally wrote the prophecy, the movie, directed by Alex Proyas ("I Robot") at least manages to keep you interested, if your eardrums are in the mood for a pummeling and your eyeballs like to drink up apocalyptic images.

At one point a woman on one side of me at the screening had both hands over her ears, while the girl to the other side had both hands over her eyes. I felt like the speak-no-evil monkey in the middle, but speak I must. The movie begins shameless, grows stupid and winds up silly. If the ending had less of the air of a crackpot religion and more pretentiousness, you could almost call it Shyamalanish.

By : KYLE SMITH