Knowing (2009)

PREDICTING APOCALYPSE Nicolas Cage

Neither as bad as you suspect nor as good as you secretly hope, Knowing is a perfectly fine way to spend a rainy Sunday. Nicolas Cage plays a hangdog widower whose son (Chandler Canterbury) finds a coded set of numbers scrawled 50 years earlier in a dug-up time capsule. Since Cage also happens to be an MIT professor of astrophysics (riiiight), he quickly susses that the list is actually a prophecy of past and future disasters. And before you can say Nostradamus, he's off to save the world from the apocalypse. It's a ho-hum premise, but director Alex Proyas (1998's overlooked Dark City) sprinkles in just enough Close Encounters sci-fi weirdness to keep things interesting, or at least, unpredictable. There's a plane-crash scene that's worth the price of a rental alone. EXTRAS include a fairly bland director's commentary and a cool feature on doomsday cults and end-of-days conspiracies. B

See all of this week's reviews