I’m sorry that I’m the one that has to break this to everybody, but there’s nothing scary about numbers, and there’s absolutely no way to make them scary. Again, I’m very sorry, but it’s true. Now, obviously, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of numbers. Without them we would have no concept of length, quantity or if someone truly is 2 cool 2 be forgotten. But with that said, when was the last time a number like -5 or 453 or even 69 (duh-haw) caused you to cry and wet your pants? That’s right, never. So why is it that every few years we get a film like the “The Number 23” or “Knowing” that attempts to exploit a nonexistent fear in a really ridiculous way? Sure, the end of the world can be terrifying, but not when it’s being inexplicably caused by a series of prime numbers.
In “Knowing,” Nicolas Cage plays a hard-drinking, faintly embittered MIT professor whose son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) discovers a sheet of paper covered in a seemingly random series of numbers in a time capsule at his elementary school. As a side note, I should point out that the time capsule is from 1959 and it’s filled with children’s drawings of the future. Shouldn’t time capsules be filled with things that reflect the era, like newspapers or Hula Hoops or whatever? What could future generations learn from some stupid kid’s hastily scrawled picture of Huckleberry Hound farting on a robot? At any rate, Cage discovers a little too quickly that the digits are actually a collection of dates that have not only predicted every major disaster in the last 50 years but also every major disaster that is yet to come. Making matters worse is the presence of “The Whisper People,” a collection of oily, Germanic men in black leather dusters who are stalking Caleb and showing him chilling yet strangely hilarious visions of moose bursting into flames. Yet, all of these elements come together to form a twist ending that will blow your mind right out of its medulla oblo-asshole! Actually, that’s a lie. If you’ve seen the trailer, you can pretty much guess the big twist. I’m just trying to get quoted on the cover of the DVD. Sorry.
Apart from an effective sequence in which Cage tries to rescue the victims of a plane crash, “Knowing,” much like “The Wicker Man” and practically every other film Cage has made in the past seven years, is awash in so many bad ideas and goofy moments (I loved the moment in which a wild-eyed Cage screams uncontrollably that, “the caves won’t save us”) that it achieves an almost camp-like brilliance. Unfortunately, the unintentional comedy is often undercut by its overlong two-hour-and-35-minute running time and by a predictable screenplay that trudges sourly through the motions.
Oh, one final pedantic note: The actual title of the film is “Know1ng.” Yeah. Can w3 plea5e 5t0p 5ub5titut1ng numb3r5 for l3tt3r5 1n m0v1e title5? N0t 0nly 1s 1t ann0y1ng (see what I mean), but at this point it’s such a clich� that nobody even notices it anymore (that is until the day when a cadre of bored 13-year-olds finally make a calculator-based sex comedy entitled “13 0 0 13 5.”)
Rating: W
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