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‘Knowing’ when to quit on a dopey movie
I’d rather forget Knowing.
There were some telling signs this movie might not be great, such as the spring release date and the presence of Nicolas Cage, an actor who apparently has forgotten how to turn down a script. What else could explain Ghost Rider and Bangkok Dangerous?
Regardless, I held out hope for Knowing for one reason: Alex Proyas, a director who deserves the adjective “visionary” more than, say, Watchmen’s Zack Snyder. In films like The Crow and Dark City, Proyas created dazzling visual worlds around fascinating characters and stories. I even thought I, Robot came off better than most people were willing to admit.
Although the numeral-obsessed premise of Knowing smacked of The Number 23 starring Jim Carrey, which didn’t compute for most people, the science fiction/Nostradamus angle made it look intriguing enough. Cage plays a teacher, John Koestler, who lost his wife in a tragic accident and has a somewhat distant relationship with his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury). Then, in a time capsule at his school, Caleb finds a sheet that has nothing but numbers on it.
Studying the sheet, John discovers what appears to be a code that predicted every major disaster from the Oklahoma City bombing to 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to the fire that claimed the life of John’s wife. What’s more, the code seems to predict three disasters that haven’t occurred yet. Naturally, John becomes obsessed with finding the key to this mysterious code.
So far, so good, I thought as the story unfolded. Whenever Knowing sticks to this idea of trying to predict disasters, it actually works pretty well. Proyas’ eye for impressive visuals serves the movie well in the disaster scenes, like a harrowing plane crash in a field, and a teeth-clenching subway disaster in New York City. The director stages the action scenes quite well, hampered only slightly by a few dodgy effects shots.
Talented as Proyas may be with a camera, his visual skills are not strong enough to save a screenplay with major problems, and Knowing is stuck with such a screenplay. Wisely, the trailers obscure the most outlandish part of the story, which involve a mysterious band of rogues called “the Whispering People.” They’re somehow supposed to be behind the pending disaster that will end the world, but they look like refugees from the cast of Twilight, made by the same studio that produced this movie. Did someone there decide that all their movies should have pale villainous types dressed in shady costumes?
Then there’s the ending, which unfortunately involves the Whispering People and makes for the most ridiculous, logic-defying, who-came-up-with-this-claptrap conclusion this side of the absurd death penalty drama The Life of David Gale. The ending is so off the rails, my reaction worsened from “Oh, come on!” to the slightly more colorful phrase abbreviated “WTF?”
I won’t say what happens at the end, except to say I felt like Cage’s otherworldly character in City of Angels, looking on powerlessly as I was unable to stop the chaos before me. Put another way, I wish I could have definitively predicted Knowing would be a mess so I could have avoided it altogether.
GRADE: C-
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Reviews
Comments
By Kelle
March 22, 2009 4:43 PM | Link to this
Right up until the end…I was pretty much enjoying the movie until the end. The whole Whispering People thing (I won’t give up the ending either)it was unexpected, and not in a good way. I didn’t know how they were going to resolve the movie, which is what kept my interest. I’ve always been a fan of disaster movies and this one would have fit that bill, except the ending. Too bad. I think it had potential.By SRCputt
March 20, 2009 6:07 PM | Link to this
That settles it. What were the showtimes for Duplicity?By Kenny D.
March 20, 2009 11:54 AM | Link to this
I don’t know what made them decide to go forward with such a scarily bad looking movie as Bangkok Dangerous, but I heard that Nick’s production company bought the rights for a remake of the original. I can’t help but wonder about the inner machinations for producing what can seem like such horrible mistakes.By Kim S.
March 20, 2009 10:32 AM | Link to this
I “know” better than to watch a movie with Nic Cage. Enough said!