Knowing

Fifty years ago, a young girl wrote a continuous stream of numbers that predict the when, number of fatalities and where of every disaster for the next fifty years. With these in hand, one man tries to stop those forthcoming disasters...

Sound interesting? OK, well try this one.

A man finds a secret code that predicts the end of the world, but there is something missing. Tracking down the descendants of the woman who wrote the code, the man is desperate to find the missing piece of code that could save the world!

That one interesting as well? OK....what about...

The Apocalypse is nigh and the four Horsemen have arrived to collect the new Adam and Eve for a new Garden of Eden.

Knowing is actually all those three storylines thrown together with a great deal of personal angst for our main character. Now, for some, you may be thinking, that's an awful lot of stuff to have in a movie and one might arguably wonder if a story like this could lose focus somewhere along the line. And surprise, surprise, you would be dead right. Knowing has a huge number of brilliant concepts that would make a really fantastic movie, but it is the most poorly executed film I've seen in a very, very long time. The script is indeed the major problem here, requiring at least one more edit before it went before the camera. The best scripts are those where every action and every line leads towards something, be it resolution of tension, story or character. Knowing has too many loose ends. Rose Byrne's character, for instance, is virtually completely redundant to the film, providing no real forward motion for anything before leaving the story in a similarly pointless fashion.

Meanwhile, on the casting front, the movie also runs into problems. Byrne may not be too bad, but Nicholas Cage, unfortunately, is completely miscast. Cage has great difficulty in conveying a lonely father and is even more unbelievable as a research lecturer. Cage manages to engage on not a single level, leaving me completely disinterested in the entire movie, and more particularly his character. I don't care that he is estranged from his father, I don't particularly care about his home problems. And this surprises me because Cage is actually, generally, a pretty reliable actor.

By the end of the movie it becomes clear that someone was desperate to use up the CG budget and so we get some spectacular CG imagery, ranging from the destruction of Earth to a new Garden of Eden. Meanwhile the sound mixer had obviously decided that the dialogue was so inane that he was going to increase the volume of Marco Beltrami's score to drown out pretty much everything. Under normal circumstances this would be great, except Beltrami provides an absolute shit score.

I rarely come out of a movie feeling disappointed, but in this particular instance I really wish I hadn't wasted either my money or my time.