Knowing
A movie by director Alex Proyas is always quite an exciting event but his latest offering Knowing sadly was way off the mark and instead of critically praised like much of his previous work it has made it on to our Worst movies of 2009 list.
Proyas has been responsible for bringing some great science fiction movies to the big screen with the likes of The Crow and I Robot.
It's a genre of film that he seems incredibly comfortable with as he creates worlds that are truly believable. So with this in mind Knowing was a movie that was highly anticipated.
In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead.
Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule’s contents and the girl’s cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler.
But it is Caleb’s father, professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years.
As John further unravels the document’s chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells three additional events, the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve John and his son.
At first this movie is incredibly intriguing as John, who has recently lost his wife, is struggling to hold himself together for the sake of his son and Caleb, who is missing his mother.
And a movie built around the prediction of a sequence of numbers begins as an exciting one as John cracks the code and then tries to prevent the disasters that are yet to happen. Link that with the strange behaviour of his son and the mystery men in black we have ourselves the basis of an intriguing watch.
However this lasts all of an hour before the suspense, drama and cleverness of the movie descends into total farce. And while the movie did provide the element of I didn't see that coming it's so over the top and bonkers that by this point you really have lost interest.
Proyas is a master at this genre and it's hard to believe why he allowed the interesting ideas in the early part of the movie to draw the short straw and get shafted in favour of the top and totally unexplainable action movie, which is what it turns into.
And while many may shout 'while action movies are good' this is so OTT with characters that make some of the most bizarre choices that cannot be justified.
By the time that the credits roll you feel totally cheated out a movie that could have questioned our beliefs and religion and the universe instead they pull out the end of the world card and we all feel like we have been here before. Original? I think not.
Cage's performance is very interesting at first an alcoholic, an atheist who is left questioning his own beliefs after the death of his wife. But that, and the fraught relationship that he has with his son, is all thrown to one side, right until the end, in favour of action and stunts.
And if you like the computer CGI special effects these here don't break new ground and, in some places, are very ropey.
What started out as an interesting movie that might have made you question what you believe just descends into a mess that we have all seen before, incredibly disappointing!
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw