KNOWING
There’s something to be said for big budget popcorn fare with Ideas - sometimes it works (The Matrix), sometimes it doesn’t (Wild Wild West), and sometimes you get a film like Knowing that lies squarely in the middle - ridiculous, but admittedly, just as entertaining.
Certainly the film opens with quite an intriguing sequence - on the dawn of a ceremony marking the burial of a time capsule, a creepy young girl flips out and starts frantically writing a sequence of numbers down on a sheet of paper; then she goes missing, only to be found a few hours later huddled in a dark closet carving numbers into wood with her bloody fingers. Flash forward fifty years - the time capsule is opened, and her mysterious sheet of numbers ends up in the hands of young Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), son to depressed widower John (Nicolas Cage).
Things even get more interesting - as John starts to unravel the mystery of the numbers, which naturally turn out to be some sort of code, Caleb starts noticing mysterious blonde men in black following him around, staring ominously into his window from the misty yard below. Desperate for answers, John turns to the now adult daughter of that strange little girl, as the creepy men in black come closer and closer to Caleb. Meanwhile, planes go down, trains get derailed, and something strange is happening with the sun…
While having long proven himself as a visionary talent in visual effects, director Alex Proyas isn’t necessarily known for his skills at pacing and at directing actors. He seems to have a thing for brooding protagonists - the heroes of I, Robot and Dark City were almost painfully morose, and in Knowing, Nicolas Cage plays a character so depressed he’s near catatonic. You wonder how a man this downtrodden - a consistently sulking boozer who speaks in a numbing monotone - could keep a high profile job and get his kid to and from school every day. Which is not to say he’s got no right to be upset - his wife has been dead less than a year, a victim of a hotel fire - but it’s hard to root for a hero this furrowed. Cage is best at playing depressed characters who have a playfully dark edge of self-awareness - witness Leaving Las Vegas and Moonstruck. Here he’s downright awful, reacting to everything as if it’s either the best or the worst news he’s ever heard, and it’s hard not to attribute that to poor direction from Proyas, especially when actress Rose Byrne plays her character with a similar mania.
To say the film “derails” in its last act is inaccurate - all roads lead to its inevitable conclusion. The problem is that its ending is predictable - and in a film stuffed with so much mystery, nothing should be that predictable. There is also a bit of a cheese factor to the final proceedings, and worst, a “…but why?” factor (seriously, this was the best that the technologically superior men in black could do??). Still, despite its flaws, Knowing is engaging and visually stunning, boasting scenes of destruction that rival anything in Independence Day and are worth the price of admission alone (the subway scene is a showstopper), and, for a while at least, a mystery that is fun to watch unravel.
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