Knowing

Nicolas Cage, eh? Sometimes truly perfect (Wild At Heart, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas) and yet synonymous with airhead, samey bollocks of a number too hefty to waste time counting. And you watch Knowing unfold as pretty much more of the same and think, 'Cage, you're decent. Get a new agent. You don't need the cash.' And so on. And Knowing dribbles away in the last 20 minutes to such cloying, deus ex machina effect as to give you plenty of time to muse such matters.

It all moves along in a far more accomplished fashion than you have any right to expect for a good 70 minutes. It's reasonably gripping; Cage's son ends up with a scroll of numbers from an excavated time-capsule during a bicentennial celebration laid on by his school. Cage places glassful of whiskey on said screed and 'circles' a group of digits he notices are factually relevant, and this 'reveal' gathers apace as voices question the veracity of such random gusto - he's 'stressed' due to the death of his wife, says one. But Cage is Cage and will not be deterred, and we know those numbers are going to nudge Cage towards imminent devastation...and it quickly starts to get a bit baggy.

A shame as the two major set-pieces are pretty good for CGI, realistic and authentically orchestrated, and actually quite ingenious for those used to the same old wooly-looking explosions and collapsing buildings that feel like computer game add-ons. These ones are good, and as such are wasted.

Rose Byrne turns up as the daughter of the woman responsible for penning the numbers, creepy looking automaton-types follow them around and it all gets a bit sinister before the most odiously tacked-on culmination to a film I can remember. The hack director, Alex Proyas, seems to think it's okay to build something passably tense for 70 minutes only to veer away from all coherence and respect for the audience with a howling Spielberg rip-off finale that has to be seen to be disbelieved. It involves pebbles, fluffy white bunny rabbits, aliens and an unlimited amount of shameless chutzpah that makes it okay for you to demand your money back from Proyas, should you ever run into the charlatan. If you thought Southland Tales had a majestically bonkers coda, forget it. This has cojones the size of space-hoppers. It's so crackers it'll make you chuckle, until Cage delivers the least convincing rendition of a devastated man you've ever seen and your ironic mirth is ruthlessly shattered by reverse Schadenfreude.

Proyas is also obsessed with over-gloomy lighting that make a lot of the scenes feel like theatre pieces. Badly lit ones. You can barely see expressions register on faces - not that there are any. Just pained approximations of drab TV-movie-standard mugging.

Nicolas Cage throws up a non-performance of epic disinterest, frowning his way to his paycheck. He's barely there, and I can only assume he knew what a bag of toss he'd got involved with and that any kind of performance would be totally wasted. He owes himself, and us, a lot better, if only because we know how good he can be and this just won't do.