Chris

Knowing: 4/10. More holes than a swiss cheese.

It starts out promising enough. The premise is that a little girl in the 1950s wrote out a string of apparently random numbers for a school art project, then in the present day the paper comes into the possession of an MIT professor (Nicholas Cage) who deduces that the numbers were actually a prediction of 'every major disaster' from then until now. But there's a twist - the last three predictions in the string are in the immediate future. So Cage sets out to see if he can affect their outcomes.

Up to that point, it's really good. The tension builds nicely and there's a plane crash that deserves an award for use of CGI. Mind you that's balanced out by a pretty ropey train wreck about 20 minutes later.

Unfortunately the plot really goes off the rails, as a gang of mysterious blokes who look like they styled themselves after an albino Danish boy band start showing up and hassling Cage's young son. Then shiny black stones start appearing all over the place. Then, half an hour from the end, the screenwriter completely throws the towel in as the story turns into a bizarre homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (except not nearly so well done).

Ultimately the film's conclusion is very dissatisfying not because that mysterious page of numbers isn't fully explained, but because the conclusion renders them completely irrelevant. It's almost like two entirely different stories glued together. A real pity.