Knowing

Well look at that, I still do watch new movies. It's not all just MST3K and old Godzilla/monster movies. I occasionally will still watch a movie that was released after 1970. I actually saw this movie opening weekend and wanted to talk about it right away. Damn bizarre compulsion to type the reviews in the order I saw the movies. Anyway I'm not nearly as motivated to talk about it now as I was back then, but we'll see what happens.

Nicholas Cage is a bizarre entity. I'm not really sure when he picked up this cult like status, I'm guessing around the time of the Wicker Man. He really isn't a bad actor, he just makes a lot of bad choices. Also I think I'm the only person on Earth who can claim that he did a powerpoint presentation on the guy. I'm always sort of rooting for Cage and want him to make good movies. Is this a turnaround? Eh, kinda.

Knowing has a very cool premise that you just know won't be executed as well as you want it to be. Sure enough that's pretty much exactly what happens. The movie actually does have a lot of cool set-up and the first half is really good, maybe even the first 3/4's. It's in the last half hour or so that things kind of go to hell.

Cage is surprisingly subdued in this one. None of his over-acting shows up here. Sadly this almost becomes a little boring. You want him to start screaming and kicking women in the stomach but sadly it never happens. The rest of the cast is merely ok, and I couldn't tell you a single one of their names so they must not have made a huge impression on me. 

This movie does have 2 stand-out sequences, which you probably already guessed are the disaster scenes. The first one is by far the better of the two, and it actually takes away some of the impact when you get to the 2nd disaster sequence because there is just no way it can compete with what you've already seen. I don't want to give away too much but the plane disaster is done entirely in one taken and it's really quite amazing to watch. Between this movie and Snake Eyes, Cage is quickly becoming the king of impressive one-shot sequences.

As disappointed as I am with how the story wraps up, when you think about it, there are very few other explanations there could have been. That doesn't stop it from still being silly though. Knowing is a good watch that sadly falls apart in the end, ruining a bit of what you have already seen. Also, if you talk about it for more than 20 seconds, you realize that just about the entire movie doesn't make any damn sense. But whatever, it's almost worth it for the plane sequence alone.

7/10