A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

The film Knowing stars Nicolas Cage and Rose Byrne. I'm not sure why I expected more from this movie than I did; I should know by now that sometimes Nicolas Cage's films don't always live up to what they should be. The film starts out as a supernatural thriller before morphing into an apocalyptic disaster story about half way through the movie. In the end there were strange parallels to the recent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (starring Keanu Reeves who also has one acting mode like Cage, however, Reeves' one mode annoys me far less than Cage does) that made me feel like Knowing was really a rip off of The Day The Earth Stood Still with a far more bleaker ending. In 1959 a young girl puts a piece of paper covered with an extremely long series of numbers into her class's time capsule. Half a century later that time capsule is unearthed and unsealed and John's (Nicolas Cage) son, Caleb, receives the girl's 'vision of the future.' John...

The movie is called Next because the main character, Cris Johnson a.k.a. Frank Cadillac, played by Nicolas Cage can see exactly two minutes into his future. Johnson is sought by an FBI agent named Callie Ferris, played by Julianne Moore, who wants him to help her track down a stolen nuclear bomb using his unique gift for "precognition." He does not want to do this and spends a good part of the movie dodging the FBI team tracking him. Then he meets a young woman (a woman young enough to be his daughter and this bothers me) named Elizabeth Cooper, played by Jessica Biel, and it's love or romance or whatever. The important thing--the thing that draws Johnson to Cooper--is that when they're together, he can see much further into his future than two minutes, and he wants to know why. In the end, Johnson must help the FBI to save the woman he loves. Johnson chooses a course of action that will presumably protect Cooper from all contact with the bad guys who are also onto t...