Knowing Review

By Faheem Ahmed     3/26/09 7:00pm

If given the opportunity to sit in the DeLorean from Back to the Future, I wouldn't go back in time to bet a million dollars on the Giants winning the Super Bowl, and I wouldn't tell my dad to invest stock in Google. Heck, I wouldn't even warn people about impending national disasters. What I would do is gun that baby to 88 mph to the year 1996 and assassinate Nicholas Cage. Why 1996, you ask? That was the year The Rock was released, the last decent movie ever made by the over-the-hill loser. Since then, Cage has unleashed a torrent of crappy films, ruining comic book franchises (Ghost Rider), forcing us to acknowledge horrible hairstyles (Con-Air, Bangkok Dangerous ... dude, you're bald, get over it) and worst of all, making hot women look like coked-out hookers (Angelina Jolie in Gone in 60 Seconds). It's been thirteen years, dammit! Enough is enough, Cage. Either you retire from acting, or I call a national boycott on your garbage movies.Seriously, America. When will you learn? Knowing actually was No. 1 in the box office this past weekend, raking in over $24 million. The only thing I know about Knowing is that it sucked. That's my entire review. I wasted $8.50 - thank you, student discount - and almost two hours watching this steaming pile of crap that vaguely resembled cinema. But believe it or not, the first twenty minutes of the movie really was not that bad.

The movie opens up with this creepy little girl in a classroom, who writes a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper to be buried in a time capsule in the 1950's. These numbers apparently predict the dates of future disasters where tons of people will die. Hello, little girl. Why did you just bury the only evidence of preventing said disasters in a stupid time capsule? Now people will not have access to it for five decades! Great planning. The movie jumps forward in time to the present, where Cage is teaching astrophysics at M.I.T. He rambles on about the conflicting theories of randomness and everything having a purpose. I would have found his discourse quite interesting had I not been distracted by his epic receding hairline.

It turns out his kid goes to the same exact elementary school as the crazy girl from the past. They open up the time capsule and each of the children are given a piece of artwork. Cage's son luckily gets those incredibly helpful numbers. Cage deciphers them after getting drunk, but rather than alerting the authorities he decides to just investigate them on his own. Responsible, huh? He could have given it to the government, who could have tested the age of the paper, found out that it was authentic and then actually prevent the next couple of disasters. But no. Cage had to move the plot along.

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I really did not think this movie could get worse, but enter Rose Byrne and her daughter, the descendants of that crazy little girl. Byrne and her daughter impressively manage to act even worse than Cage and his emotionless robot shell of a son. There is a hilarious twenty minute sequence where Cage discovers the right location to save the entire planet. Rather than listen, Byrne screams that he is lying, kidnaps the children, loses the children to aliens and then totally gets run down by a pickup truck.

Oh, did I forget to mention that there were aliens in this movie? Yeah, aliens. And I can guarantee they would go back and shoot Cage, too.

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