Thursday, March 19th 2009, 4:45 PM
There are things that need to be decided before going into "Knowing."
The first is, do you want to know anything about it? Another is, do you mind if the filmmakers couldn't decide what they were making - an apocalyptic chiller? Disaster flick? Alien horror movie? Paranoid religious parable?
If the answers are yes and no, read on.
This Nicolas Cage weird-a-thon throws in everything but the kitchen sink, and that may be hiding in it, too.
The plot seems simple enough: A time capsule buried by schoolchildren in 1959 included a list of numbers written by a spooky little girl who knew the dates and locations of future catastrophes.
Fifty years later, an astrophysicist (Cage) and his son find the note - and dad figures out its chilling meaning.
Yet the 12 people who saw Jim Carrey's "The Number 23" know numerology can't be trusted ... to provide excitement.
Watching Cage - who seems disengaged but isn't as bad as he too often can be - figure out the pattern is as electrifying as watching someone do a Jumble puzzle.
Soon, "Knowing" becomes an extended "X-Files" episode that reaches for sci-fi relevance but just keeps getting sillier, like when four mysterious guys with shiny blond hair show up
looking like Rutger Hauer's family reunion.
This is the kind of movie where Cage's academic character lectures his class and lays out the underlying theme. Oh, the universe is designed or left to chance; got it.
That comes before director Alex Proyas delivers very ugly images of Manhattan devastation and a disturbing airplane crash.
Was there a prediction of this laughably bad movie in "The Mothman Prophecies"?
Nicolas Cage's 'Knowing' isn't prophetic ... just pathetic 
Think for yourself. Question authority.
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