Okay, maybe I’m being a bit too harsh on Nicolas Cage’s latest hit with that title, but “Knowing” is a flawed, schizophrenic flick that teases us with phenomenal special effects & freaky ‘end of days’ logic but ultimately fails due to a pathetic sideshow featuring cheesy otherworldly forces...
“Knowing” is essentially a misguided cross between “The DaVinci Code” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. Cage stars as an MIT professor who comes across a 50-year-old list of numbers in a time capsule. Since he’s obviously a super-smart dude, he cracks the numeric puzzle in an alcohol-induced haze & realizes he’s stumbled upon a detailed prophecy for the end of the world (and a few other catastrophes that will occur in the meantime). Of course, in the grand tradition of disaster flicks, nobody believes him, so he’s stuck trying to figure out a way to save the world all by himself...
Director Alex Proyas does a superb job visually with the catastrophes wedged into the screenplay - I’m not sure but my mouth may have actually been hanging open in awe at his two showcase scenes of destruction. However, the last twenty minutes are a supreme letdown, a copout that should embarrass the screenwriters totally & completely. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say that “Knowing” has one of the dumbest endings ever in the history of major motion pictures. If omnipotent celestial beings judged us on the climax of this flick, we’d be doomed...
In summation, “Knowing” could have been a creepy jaunt in the tradition of M. Night Shyamalan’s first few flicks; instead, we get yet another example of Hollywood’s insistence on shying away from intelligent scripts in favor of the easy out...a weak 2 ½ Eddies for “Knowing”...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment