knowing

Movie after movie, Hollywood invites its audience to suspend its disbelief. But Nicolas Cage as an MIT astrophysics professor and savior of the world is just too much.

This is the premise of Knowing, the latest prophecy science-fiction thriller that continues Cage's downward spiral. He plays Professor John Koestler, whose son inherits a page full of numbers that correspond to the dates and locations of every major tragedy since 1959.

The document contains three dates in the future, and the noble professor takes it upon himself to protect the globe. It's a numerological, code-cracking M. Night Shyamalan doomsday popcorn flick.

Sound familiar? Maybe because Cage was a clairvoyant magician preventing the world from nuclear attack in 2007's Next.

What begins as a mildly engaging premise for an apocalyptic flick devolves into a dizzying mess of unbelievable events and overblown PG-13 disaster sequences. The vapid script throws in aliens and Old Testament allusions, trying and failing to say something about determinism. The absurdity almost rivals Cage's hammy performance.

Knowing doesn't really promise to be good. Its star is Nic Cage. It's a March release. It's a B-list director. All it had to be was an enjoyable popcorn flick. And it failed.

"Knowing is everything," the tagline tells us. Wrong. Knowing is a waste of two hours.