Knowing: Critic Reviews

I'm a bit on the fence with Knowing. It is well made, and bleak as hell, but just has a little too much going on for me to recommend it.

If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.

The draggy, lurching two hours of Knowing will make you long for the end of the world, even as you worry that there will not be time for all your questions to be answered.

Some movies, however unpromising, can be saved by a great ending. Here is one.

If you're of a mind to believe a dreary and far-fetched thriller about numerology-crazed alien life forms, then you may find the movie mildly diverting.

The narrative corner into which this movie, directed by Alex Proyas, paints itself is a simultaneously silly and morbidly depressing one.

It's a Nicolas Cage movie, so, admit it, you're expecting crazy. You have no idea.

Was there a prediction of this laughably bad movie in The Mothman Prophecies?

Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.

Knowing has the evangelical fervor of a movie that feels as if it were made during W's first term. Which is to say, Knowing is as potent a slice of disaster porn as Left Behind. It dabbles in faith and doubt and has no patience for f

The dialogue is sci-fi standard-issue, composer Marco Beltrami shamelessly cribs from Bernard Herrmann, and wispy Rose Byrne barely registers as Cage's ally.

A weird and gloomy existential thriller.

The resolution of the mysterious visitors' mission and John's crisis of faith feels more like an excuse to stage some hellacious cataclysms than the product of a genuine belief in anything at all.

It's all very creepy, satisfyingly so.

A not-bad supernatural-tinged sci-fier that has more on its mind than the run-of-the-mill effects-driven extravaganza.

The movie begins shameless, grows stupid and winds up silly. If the ending had less of the air of a crackpot religion and more pretentiousness, you could almost call it Shyamalanish.

The dizziness of it all might not have been so obvious had we not had a long prologue and a finale that climaxes with two or three anti-climaxes, a couple of them laugh-out-loud silly.

The frustrating thing about Knowing is the story is worthy. But director Proyas tries to cram too much in, as if the tricks and effects wizardry are all that really counts. They aren't.

Its breathlessness and permanent state of confusion make you long for the assured touch of M. Night Shyamalan.

If Alex Proyas' Knowing were reasonably entertaining -- instead of just dour, pointless and tedious -- it would be a camp classic.

Knowing is a classic case of a movie that is crammed with interesting ideas but is unable to conceptualize them in a compelling fashion.

Hokum is best served straight, not as a New Age cocktail with too many ingredients.

For me, it doesn't quite work; still I'm glad he took the risk.