.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

Like him or hate him. That seems to be the sentiment around the office when the career of Nicholas Cage comes into conversation.

Some have fond memories of his turns in Raising Arizona, Face/Off and Leaving Las Vegas. Others find him creepy and duds like Valley Girl, The Wicker Man and Bangkok Dangerous continually come into the conversation.

Like him or hate him, there are few actors today that work harder. According to imdb.com, Cage has five films due out this year with his name in the credits and another three in 2010. Just think about that for a second. How many Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford films were shooting through the studio's at the height of their popularity.

Granted, Cage is in a bit of a rut. Since the Gawd-awful The Wicker Man in 2005, his credits have included Ghost Rider, Next and Bangkok Dangerous and the follow up in the ultra-successful National Treasure franchise. Not one of these films garnished over 32% critic approval rating (with Bangkok coming in lowest at 9%) on rottentomatoes.com. Just think about that for a second. If you were in High School and five of your courses got you no better than 32% on your report card, well, I guess you will be repeating the year, won't you?

This week, Cage hits our theatres again with Knowing, a film directed by Alex Proyas who showed so much promise back in 1998 when his film Dark City took critics by storm.

Knowing stars Cage as John Koestler, an MIT Professor and single father who comes into possession of a series of written numbers that were put in a time capsule 50 years ago and given as part of a school project to his son Caleb.
The numbers might look random, but Koestler uncovers that the numbers link to dates and death tolls of horrific events in the earth's history over the past half century. Worse still, there are three dates that will occur with horrific consequences in the next week and Koestler tries to determine what these final events might be in hopes that he may avert the forecasted inevitable.

Maybe that is where Koestler and I are the furthest apart. If I was informed where and when an event of terrifying costs in human tragedy, I would be running away from the exact location, not running towards it.

But that is how Knowing plays out. Koestler runs around like a mad dog spewing incoherent coincidences while his son seems to be stalked by a group of men ripped right from the pages of The Da Vinci Code.

Along the way, the audience is treated to above average special effects with a plane crash and a subway accident that takes the lives of a predicted few hundred innocents.

And thank goodness for the effects, for everything else in the film is so forced, so laughable and so poorly executed that its final product puts Knowing in the running for the worst film of 2009.

So much is wrong with Knowing, it's hard to focus on one particular shortfall to elaborate. The acting, especially Cage, is downright deplorable. Cage looks tired and confused and is given some of the most forced dialogue I have seen in some time for the purposes of trying to direct the story down certain plotlines.

But bad acting is only allowed by bad directing and a script that is as polished as a pair of muddy Nike's. And Alex Proyas throws so many things at his audience with minimal success that you can't overlook the Razzie award performances.

By the time Knowing is over, Aliens are revealed in a major plot malfunction and religious references are forced on a bored and uninterested audience.

There will be no Knowing 2. I can at least thank Proyas for that. The ending, which you will have to conclude for yourself whether it is worth the pain of sitting through, destroys almost everyone. Too bad it couldn't have put me out of my misery and saved me the pain of having to relive the experience for this review.