Overcooked, pretentious, full of Nic Cage and yet utterly watchable, Knowing delivers a decent enough mixture of ideas and spectacle that rests somewhere between a slightly expensive seeming cinema ticket and a really good evening in front of the TV.
Directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City), the film centres around a sheet of seemingly random numbers taken from a time capsule at a school’s fiftieth anniversary. Of course the sheet is picked out by the boy who’s dad just so happens to be a Nic Cage shaped astrophysics professor. Naturally mum is dead and so our hero is a broken man and a movie drunk (i.e. once the boy is in bed he drinks Scotch that he doesn’t like, listens to classical music and looks into the distance) and so it ain’t too long before he notices that there might be a pattern in the numbers. He picks up a pen and starts writing…
9 1 1 0 1 2 9 9 6
What could these numbers possibly mean?
Funnily enough, even though you may find yourself almost shouting at the screen whilst this ‘genius’ splits the numbers into various meaningless combinations, such shortfalls don’t actually harm the film. In fact there are several moments of what can only be described as rubbish (some nonsense with a door is pure guff) but Proyas keeps you onside by managing to balance both subtle creep and big, noisy, harsher than expected set pieces. Another bonus is the rare spectacle of child actors that don’t annoy and a central performance by the Cage that is actually pretty good.
At the end of the day Knowing is a good idea, with a decent budget, that has been fortunate enough to land in the hands of a director with vision and talent. It’s not a great film, but it is enjoyable and thought provoking and definitly worth spending a couple of hours with.
Knowing is available now on Region 1 DVD. The Region 2 DVD is released on 3rd August.
I really hated this film. it annoyed me beyond belief. See my review:
http://fandangogroovers.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/not-knowing-why-this-film-was-made/
Pay particular attention to the plot holes at the end of the review including one that includes the door you mention:
“If the girl was so compelled to finish the number sequence that she locked herself in a cupboard and scratched it into the back of the door with her bloody fingers why did it take her an entire day to do this? When Caleb had the paper taken from him in a similar way he continued to write on the desk immediately.”
I wasnt the biggest fan of this movie either. But I did find myself wanting to see which direction it was going at the end.
I think with the whole numbers thing it reminded me at times as The Number 23. Just numbers being related to things. (Yes bad link I know).
But anyway, I have been really disappointed in Nic Cage over the past few years.
He actually makes a lot of films, in the last ten years he has made three really good films: Bringing Out the Dead, Adaptation and Matchstick Men. And two reasonably good films: Gone in Sixty Seconds and Lord of War.
haven’t seen Knowing, hopefully never will. Cage’s best film is Red Rock West, of course
Cage’s best? I thought the law was that you had to say Leaving Las Vegas?
…personally I prefer him in Wild At Heart.
Don’t forget Raising Arizona but agreed Wild at Heart is the best.
Very good movie.