'Knowing' review

Nicolas Cage (Credit: Vince Valitutti/Summit)

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As if numbers didn't already bear enough bad news lately. Astrophysics professor John (Nicolas Cage) discovers a 50-year-old numeric sequence that has accurately predicted the date, location and number of victims for all of the world's major tragedies—from hotel fires to 9/11—and forecasts more to come. While John tries to prevent terrorism and environmental collapse, John's son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) communicates with "The Whisper People," a group of weirdoes who hang out in the woods and are somehow tied to what's happening.

The buzz: That's quite a modern anxiety stew, with hints of "Final Destination," Jim Carrey's awful "The Number 23" and Cage's own "Next." The question is where "Knowing" will fall on the recent Cage spectrum of totally boring ("Bangkok Dangerous") and unintentionally hilarious ("The Wicker Man").

The verdict: Oh. Come. On. Director Alex Proyas ("Dark City") knows better than to exploit legitimate societal concerns and real-life horrors for a genre-melding mush that seems like it was made up on the fly. The increasingly strange "Knowing" doesn't go where you think it will, but the places it goes are completely misguided and meaningless. Cage isn't the movie's Achilles' heel for a change, as he effectively travels between anger, curiosity and fear. But the movie's too ridiculous to be taken seriously and too serious to be dismissed as mindless trash.

Did you know? Caleb says he knows when his dad says, "I'll think about it," that it inevitably means no. Beware, parents—the secret's out.

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