"Watchmen" is about as apocalyptic as a chorus of hickory-dickory-dock compared with the in-your-screaming-face end-times anxiety and special-effects cataclysm of "Knowing," a wacked-out, quasi-religious "Donnie Darko" for dummies camouflaged (in its ad campaign) as yet another generic Nicolas Cage action vehicle with a frustratingly uninformative title (see -- or rather, don't see -- "Next").
Nicolas Cage in 'The Knowing'
Rose Byrne and Nicolas Cage try to decipher a numerological note that predicts natural disasters in Alex Proyas' "Knowing." John Beifuss says the film is engrossing because of its sheer ridiculousness.
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 ...
Rating: PG-13 for disaster sequences, disturbing images and brief strong language
Length: 122 minutes
Released: March 20, 2009 Nationwide
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury, Ben Mendelsohn, Adrienne Pickering
Director: Alex Proyas
Writer: Ryne Person, Richard Kelly, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White, Stuart Hazeldine, Alex Proyas
Directed by Alex Proyas, who seemed like Hollywood's idea of a visionary until he followed the pre-"Matrix" sci-fi mind games of "Dark City" (1998) with the Asimovian atrocity of "I, Robot" (2004), "Knowing" hinges on a promising premise: What if a time capsule, unearthed in 2009 on the 50th anniversary of its burial, contained a numerological note from the past accurately predicting five decades of deadly disasters, including several yet to come?
The note's unlikely decoder is a widowed MIT physics professor and pastor's son (Cage) who credits "chemical accidents and biological mutations" for Earth's fecundity, and believes "there is no grand meaning, no purpose" to life -- although he tells his young son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), it's OK to believe that mom is in heaven (or somewhere) if he wants to. Naturally, the note rocks the professor's world -- especially when he follows its instructions and becomes an eyewitness at two violent disasters, depicted by Proyas with shockingly bravura body-burning and body-smushing explicitness.
A film of pretentious yet booga-booga-scary M. Night Shenanigans as well as disaster-movie spectacle, "Knowing" earns my endorsement not because it's coherent but because it's so over the top it kept me engrossed (and occasionally aghast) for its entire 122 minutes. Proyas is a director who doesn't know when to quit; he shows us not just a plane crash but -- in what may be a screen first -- a burning moose. Proyas seems fully committed to the "reality" of his scenario; he doesn't cut away but requires his actors (including Rose Byrne as a pretty single mom) to react -- overreact, some might say -- to circumstances of impossibly cosmic far-outness. Seemingly just as committed to the drama was composer Marco Beltrami, whose loud, intense, unnerving score seems mashed together from the most propulsive elements of Bernard Herrmann's music for "Psycho" and Danny Elfman's music for "Pee-wee's Big Adventure."
The screenplay touches on fears of ecological and infrastructural collapse while also providing a distressing yet reassuring (you know, like the Flood) biblical parable for an increasingly skeptical nation. (A poll this month found "a rise in Americans with no religion," according to CBS News.) Four writers, in addition to Proyas, are credited with the script; as many people, apparently, were required to meet the needs of the movie's star: The end credits include the "Chef for Nicolas Cage," "Trainer for Nicolas Cage," "Driver for Nicolas Cage" and "Security for Nicolas Cage."
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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