Nicolas Cage Is a Joke in Superserious Knowing

The wannabe creepy disaster tale is undone by the campiness of its star

Review in a Hurry: Knowing is only half the battle, as a decent script—about scarily accurate apocalyptic prophecies unearthed in an elementary school time capsule—is sabotaged by cartoonish CG and the even-more-cartoonish Nicolas Cage.

The Bigger Picture: Fifty years ago, a freaky little girl (Lara Robinson) straight out of a Japanese horror movie comes up with the idea for her class to do a time capsule. While the rest of her schoolmates put cool drawings of rocket ships inside, she just writes rows and rows of numbers, then hides in a closet where she scratches the walls until her fingers bleed.

Cut to the present. The time capsule is opened, and young Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) gets hold of the numbers and shows them to his father, John (Cage), who immediately notices 9-11-01 on there. He extrapolates from there that every other number is a major disaster date, predicted in order, with a few yet to happen. Meanwhile, creepy albinos in dark jackets, who apparently escaped from director Alex Proyas' other movie Dark City, seem to be shadowing Caleb's every move.

It is at times quite an eerie story, with Proyas doing his best to make the disaster sequences as disturbing as possible given the constraints of a PG-13 rating and the fact that he's trying to replicate New York City in Australia via CG that's so five years ago (should've given Peter Jackson a call!).

But Proyas must have been in a time capsule of his own when he allowed the casting of Cage. Yes, the '80s Nic Cage would have been perfect for a dark, Twilight Zone-style tale, but the hysterical, over-gesticulating, Elvis-accented loon who starred in the National Treasure movies and Ghost Rider is not that guy any more. Hasn't been in a while.

Make no mistake, Cage can still be entertaining as hell but only in a movie that's not looking to be taken too seriously, and boy, Proyas really seems to be trying hard to freak out audiences here. The only person it's apparently working on is his star.

The 180—a Second Opinion: What needs to happen here is a reversal of the usual way Hollywood does business: Get a Japanese director to do an Asian remake with no stars and a more modest budget. The material is solid enough; it just requires different execution.

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