Blowing

Knowing is a hilarious, hysterical and
truly terrible disaster movie

LIFE-AFFIRMINGLY AWFUL: Knowing

by MARK SLUTSKY

Some movies are so bad they’re life-affirming. I am happy to be alive so that I could see and marvel at Knowing, one of the few films that has ever made me laugh out loud in the theatre from its sheer, courageous awfulness. It’s worth noting that the last film that made me feel this way was Neil Labute’s preposterous Wicker Man remake. The connective tissue here is that both star Nicolas Cage, who is on some kind of a one-man bad movie rampage.

Knowing was directed by Alex Proyas, who directed the sort-of interesting Dark City in the ’90s but more recently was responsible for the Will Smith vehicle I, Robot. That was pretty lifeless and shoddy, but it’s nothing, I mean nothing, compared to Knowing, which is about as close as a 21st-century Ed Wood film as I can imagine. A barely-disguised Biblical allegory, it even feels like it was financed by a church group.

Cage plays John Koestler, a widowed MIT professor with a precocious son (played by the Chaucerian-sounding Chandler Canterbury), who receives a mysterious envelope when his school digs up a time capsule planted there 50 years prior. Inside the envelope is a page filled with random-seeming numbers, but when Cage realizes that they somehow predicted 9/11, as well as every other disaster in the past half-century, he flips his wig.

Soon, he makes contact with the grown-up daughter (Rose Byrne) of the kid who scrawled the numbers in the first place, and together they run around and freak out as they realize some big final super-cataclysm is coming, and then freak out some more when they notice some sinister, and by that I mean deeply goofy-looking, dudes in trench coats are following them around.

There’s not even that much disaster in this alleged disaster movie, save for a couple of sequences involving transit accidents where Cage mostly runs around in circles as extras burn to death. The only entertainment value to be had here, really, is in all of the main characters’ hysterical hooting and hollering. I can’t recommend this movie in good conscience, but it’s recent-Shyamalan-level ludicrous, and that’s at least something.

KNOWING OPENS THIS FRIDAY,
MARCH 20