Movie Review: “Knowing”

Posted by staticblog

on March 23, 2009M at 11:48 am

Rating: 49

With its foreboding sheet full of seemingly random numbers, possessed children and ever-increasing series of fiery disasters, Alex Proyas’ “Knowing” has all the makings of a cinematic apocalypse. But along the way to Earth’s ultimate endgame, “Knowing” gets tripped up by Nicolas Cage’s overwrought performance and the obligatory computer-generated destruction of Manhattan.

In 1959, the students at a new elementary school in Boston bury a time capsule filled with their drawings of what the world will be like in 50 years. One of the children is Lucinda Embry, a disturbed girl who writes a long series of numbers on her sheet. When the capsule is finally unearthed and the pages are distributed to current students, Lucinda’s cryptic message is given to Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury), whose father John (Cage) is an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John, who has spent most nights drinking alone since Caleb’s mother died, examines Lucinda’s page and discovers that the numbers seem connected to every major disaster of the past half-century, while the last few might foretell future cataclysms. While digging for clues, he connects with Lucinda’s daughter, Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), who’s been running away from her mother’s visions and predictions her whole life.

Throughout “Knowing,” Cage punctuates his generally somber mood with spontaneous bursts of over-excited anger, as if he’s both overly caffeinated and carbonated. It’s a performance that begs for some subtle middle ground. Byrne fares far better, and the casting of Lara Robinson as both Lucinda and Diana’s daughter Abby was inspired — Robinson looks like she was genetically engineered to play Byrne’s child.

But then “Knowing” gets bogged down in some boilerplate science fiction plot points involving creepy pale people lurking in the shadows and the aforementioned New York skyline wipeout. Granted, it has been over three months since Manhattan got socked in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but is it too much to ask for mass-market thrillers to space this cliché out a bit? “Knowing” can be genuinely suspenseful thanks to Proyas’ good pacing and atmospherics. But these days, it seems that when you’ve seen one end of the world, you’ve seen them all.

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