Nicholas Cage movies can be divided into two camps: either they can be very entertaining and justify his cocksure smirk (e.g. The Rock, National Treasure) or they can drain a little of your soul away 90 minutes at a time (e.g. Face/Off, Ghost Rider). Last night Katie and I watched Know1ng and this morning I couldn't see my reflection in the mirror.
To be fair, this wasn't all Nick's doing; he was mainly the delivery boy. In actuality, he even had a few moments in Know1ng there where I believed him to be someone other than a slight variation on his character from Con Air - a rarity to be sure since he hasn't been hired to do anything but work in the "Nick Cage shout" (as Katie aptly calls it) six times per feature since Moonstruck. He's partly responsible, no doubt, since he collected a paycheck. He should at least donate to a movie-based metaphysical injury support group or something.
The real devil is Alex Proyas (The Crow; Dark City; I, Robot), the director. Don't worry if you've never heard of him. I had to look him up on IMDB just to be able to spell his name. Steven Spielberg he's not. Heck, Stephen Baldwin he's not. If you look at his resumé you'll get the idea about the direction Know1ng goes: some guy has an inexplicable string of events happen to him that leads him to a moral choice and then aliens come. And they're from the Bible. Oh, and all the little girls look like Children of the Corn.
Or something like that. By the time the credits rolled I didn't care any more and couldn't stuff the DVD in the Netflix envelope fast enough.
I suppose the worst part was that I went up on IMDB for reinforcement that the movie sucked and found it had an aggregate score north of .265 stars. Worse than that, one 10 star guy was proclaiming that Proyas is a visionary; a prophet of cinema; a genius. A genius of what? Drilling plot holes? (The main character finds a belief in heaven after he sees that angels are actually aliens who take his son?) Picking at threads that never lead anywhere? (What the &@#$ are the polished rocks supposed to mean?) Stuffing the main characters into a sausage casing and setting the oven to broil? ("Okay everybody, group hug. Hold it...hold it...now you're a Swanson dinner.") It makes me wonder who Proyas has compromising pictures of and what he's said he'll do with them if he doesn't get to break wind on celluloid and release it to 3,000 theaters on opening weekend.
How much Ritalin do they pass out in school these days that somebody gave this movie a perfect score? I guess that just proves Proyas right: there are aliens lurking among us pretending to be something they're not. In this instance, however, the aliens are not made of light, they just think they're enlightened.
