Knowing (2009)

The only thing I needed to be knowing was how great the first 1.5 hours were and how bad the last 30 minutes were. So then I could turn it off. And I probably would have turned it off, had I not had to write a review of this film. Let me be more specific. You can’t turn it off, because the awful ending is weaved into the good parts of this film. And don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good moments in this film. The plot of the film is that after 50 years, Nicolas Cage finds a piece of paper that has the dates of every major disaster in the world (granted, he figured this out while he was drinking), and then he loses his mind. He goes crazy trying to stop all of these disasters, supposedly ending in the apocalypse within a month (convenient, ain’t it?). Then he meets other people, and there’s his son, but they’re just plot devices. I like Nicolas Cage. I know he is a great actor. But he is more serious than anyone I’ve ever seen. If he treated it like a B-thriller, it would have been so much better. Alex Proyas (Dark City and I, Robot) directs this film with a sense of seriousness that-dare I say it-rivals Cage’s. The film feels over-the-top gritty, to the point that it becomes annoying. But dang, he knows how to pull off a great action sequence! The best moment in the film is the 2-to-5-minute-long shot of a plane crash and Nicolas Cage trying to help the survivors. This shot is continuous, and it shows that Proyas knows exactly what he’s doing. The shot is one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time, and it makes me sad that it would be wasted on this movie. Also, the train crash is nothing short of spectacular. Now for the ending. I hated the ending of Minority Report because it threw away the tone of the film. The ending of Knowing doesn’t throw away the tone, it just throws away the previous hour and a half. I’m personally not one for religious films (I am a Christian, but I do believe that everything has its place and should stick to it), but if anything is done well, I’ll buy. And this wasn’t. It was sloppy, and made me really ticked off. I hated this movie more than Little Fockers. And while I’ll give this a more positive review, it’s because I knew Little Fockers didn’t have potential. And the sad thing is, this movie had so much potential and threw it into the wind. Personally, I don’t believe that there are just disasters by God in this movie. I think that the piece of paper Nicolas Cage found was saying when someone was about to watch the ending of the film on a plane, or train, or something like that. The man in charge felt very bad for that person, so they decided to crash it. It is what I would have done.
5/10