Knowing (*1/2)

KNOWING

Evil numbers = disaster. Evil numbers = death. Evil numbers = the end of the world. Dude, Hugo Reyes would hate this movie. I'm not too fond of it either. Nicolas Cage plays an MIT professor scrambling to unravel the mystery of a piece of paper covered by numbers written by a little girl and unearthed from a time capsule buried 50 years ago. There are also men in black coats who appear out of nowhere called The Whisper People who must be second cousins twice removed from the Strangers in director Alex Proyas's Dark City. Knowing flogs the old movie chestnut of When A Man Knows The End of the World is Coming and No One Believes Him, He Must Then Behave Like a Complete Lunatic. The movie's set up is decent and intriguing but by midpoint senseless action and the Idiot Plot kicks in. Some of the CGI is staggeringly bad, especially the truly awful sequence where a subway train derails in downtown NYC and demolishes a subway station. The ending is a crock. On the plus side, there's some nice location shooting in Boston. Except for when Rose Byrne and Cage park their cars in the Copley Garage and emerge at the Museum of Science across the Charles River in Cambridge. I hate shit like that.