Knowing (DVD)

When I rented this movie, I only knew two things about it. First, the plot seemed similar to Nicolas Cage’s ‘Next’, a movie which also relies heavily on future predictions in order to prevent a forthcoming disaster.  Second, I know that Nicolas Cage owes me a solid movie. That’s right. The man owes me. I’ve sat through quite a few recent Nic Cage movies expecting to relive his former glory status from ‘The Rock’ or ‘Con Air’. Hell at this point I’d be satisfied with some ‘Gone in 60 seconds’ level of entertainment.  They say that knowing is half the battle. This may be true, but you can still lose the battle if all you have is knowing.

The premise of the film starts out very promising. It starts out in 1959 at an elementary school where they are placing items in a time capsule and are about to bury it for future generations. An odd looking young girl frantically scribbles down numeric sequences on a card to be placed in the capsule, while her classmates are all coloring pictures for their future counterparts. The girl’s writing is interrupted as her teacher grabs her writing and abruptly places it into the capsule.

Fast forward to the present day where Nicolas Cage’s son attends the same school and his class is about to have a ceremony where they open the time capsule from 50 years prior. Cage’s son happens to be the one who gets the card with the mysterious number sequence.  Later that night, Cage analyzes the numbers and realizes that they predict every major disaster since the time of the capsule up until the present day. Even more shocking is that they foretell of accidents that have not yet happened, but are predicted to occur.  As the predictions on the sheet begin to come true, Cage deciphers that the next prediction details the end of the world and that we must make preparations if we are to survive. That is about where the good stuff ends.

The movie suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be  a sci fi, horror, or thriller flick and it doesn’t have the charm to successfully combine all three. I won’t spoil the plot for those who want to watch this film, but everything really started unraveling for me at about the mid way point.  The plot had a lot of potential, just somewhere during the execution it all got muddled up.

The acting in this movie is definitely workable, although there really isn’t any focus on characters other than Nicolas Cage and his son. Cage is decent, although his role doesn’t seem to require a whole lot from him. The son is decent also, since he doesn’t have too much to do in this flick either. Chances are that this film won’t be in the top of Cage’s filmography.  It’s too bad the little girl couldn’t have put in a warning about the release dates for Cage’s latest movies.

Knowing is a sub par attempt at combining a bunch of different movie genres with lackluster results. By the end of the film, I didn’t really care what happened to anyone in the story. Maybe serious Nic Cage fans will love this movie, but I felt that there were so many problems that not even Cage’s likability could overcome them.  Overall, I would suggest this as a rental only if there really isnt anything else on the shelves.