Knowing

I'll give you the long and short of it: Knowing has several stop-the-heart special effects, effects that take you to a different kind of adrenaline rush. It's wow time when they come up. However, they're not the whole movie, unfortunately.

The problem is that these events are broken up by long stretches of yawn time. Boring substitutes for plot here, although I'm sure they were going for spiritual moments. Those moments are muddled, where airplane-crashing-into-earth-just-feet-from-you is crystal clear.

John (played by Nicolas Cage) is an astrophysicist instructor at MIT when he discovers that the paper dug up out of the 50-year-old time capsule can predict disasters. Somehow his son is mixed up in all this.

We quickly learn John's sad backstory, that his wife died a year ago in a fire, and he's raising his son alone. It's a difficult time, still, for both. John has turned against his father, and apparently his mother and sister, too, because his father is a minister and apparently John can't believe in God any more. At least I think that was what was going on.

The word "knowing" is about faith. Faith that there's a higher being, watching over all of us. Faith that there's something beyond the physical.

But we can't have faith that this movie knows where it's going. It's at once a horror story -- and the story they show us at the beginning about the girl who wrote the paper with all the numbers is quite intriguing and horrifying -- but that isn't really followed up. And then there are those guys following John's son -- they're sort of explained in the end, but not really, and that storyline slips into sci fi. And at the end, we have a spectacular special effect as we head into the abyss of spirituality without substance. It's confusing, and it's definitely a downer.

People were shaking their heads and muttering to themselves as they walked out of the theatre I was in. I agree. This one will leave you befuddled.

Thumbs down.