3. Knowing
It's an unwritten law that Nicolas Cage, or Batman, or Nicolas Cage being Batman must feature at some point in any article, so here's my ode to Hollywood's favorite long-faced over-actor. When we were first shown Knowing, it looked pretty serviceable. It was something of a Final Destination knock-off, only with the effects budget of The Day After Tomorrow and featuring the peversely pleasurable sight of Cage phoning in a performance to buy himself a flamingo, or whatever it is movie stars buy these days. Just to sum up the plot for you, it goes a little something like this the atrociously-haired one stumbles across a prophetic book of numbers which seem to predict disasters, right down to the death tolls. Again, it's not amazingly original it's simply an amalgam of the above movies, the result of a coked-up meeting of creative execs halfway through the bucket of Peruvian marching powder. But still, I've spent money on worse, so I happily filed into the cinema. Here's the thing about movies they usually adhere to a certain plot formula involving the hero overcoming an obstacle, with his efforts providing the impetus of what happens onscreen. If the film's being clever, the protagonist can fail, but outside of the truly original films basically, not a Nic Cage money-spinner something tends to happen, and it tends to make some sense. What's not supposed to happen is the protagonist gives up, and an alien race who appear to live exclusively in the woods around Cage's house whisk his child off to a flower-planet. That sort of stuff wasn't in the big book of script-writing, and there's a good reason for that it's goddamn demented. Strangely, it serves as a perfect microcosm of the film itself what was once a clever disaster movie got abducted by an alien genre flick, and it's just as bonkers as it sounds. It's one of the only films I've come out of feeling so bewildered that I had to clap eyes onto other moviegoers and ask them if that actually happened. Apparently it did, and I'm still so very confused at that fact.