Keifer Sutherland returns to television next year in the Fox drama, Touch, and the trailer just came out today.  Keifer stars as a single father whose son is mute (and I thought I read somewhere autistic) and is constantly writing numbers and patterns.  Keifer’s character eventually figures out, with the help of some eccentric expert played by Danny Glover, that his son is able to predict events before they happen.  So it’s basically like Knowing except the entire world probably won’t blow up at the end.  Tim Kring, the man behind Heroes, is behind the show and Fox has already ordered 13 episodes.  It looks pretty good but it’s going to be hard to accept Keifer as anyone other than Jack MFing Bauer but I’ll probably give the show a look when it debuts next spring.  Check out the trailer below:

Directed by Alex Proyas, who brought us I, Robot, the plot of Knowing follows MIT astrophysicist John Koestler (Cage) and his son Caleb.  50 years ago a time capsule was buried at William Dawes Elementary school and one of the students, Lucinda, instead of drawing what the future would look like, filled the paper with numbers.  Of course, Caleb recieves the numbers and John figures out that the numbers correspond to every major disaster of the last 50 years and there are three to come.  It starts out fairly interesting but the movie kind of loses it’s mind in the last half hour or so and you might wonder if someone spliced in The Fountain or something similar.

The highlight of the movie is the disaster sequences.  There is a horrific plane crash, a subway crash and the final disaster that I won’t spoil.  The plane crash particularly, is well done as Proyas uses a two minute tracking shot of John walking into the debris try to find survivors.  People are screaming and running around on fire, it’s frighteningly realistic.  Unfortunately there isn’t the level of fun that comes from say, a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.  Everyone is grim faced and the movie takes itself a little too serious for what it is.  This probably isn’t helped by the acting, which is pretty universally bad.  When Nicolas Cage isn’t mumbling sadly about numbers he’s running around disasters like a madman.  The actor who plays his son is not very good and comes off as kind of an ass throughout the movie.  Rose Byrne plays the daughter of Lucinda but she is very much in the Zooey Deschanel in The Happening school of acting where she just acts scared and wide eyed the whole time.

Overall I would say that Knowing is an OK movie, which is definitely a step up for Cage.  The acting is not very good and the plot derails itself, much like the subway scene, near the end but the disaster sequences are very well done and probably worth a rent just for that.

3 out of 5

DVDs

Knowing

Push

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vol. 15

Peanuts 1960′s Collection

The Unborn

Reno 911 Season Six

The Deep (Blu Ray)

Video Games

The Bigs 2 (Wii, 360, PS3, PS2, PSP)

Street Fighter 4 (PC)

This weekend the Nicolas Cage threat level is raised to near Wicker Man levels as Knowing comes out and it’s only a few percentage points above that terror’s freshness.  We also have the bromantic comedy I Love You, Man and the spymantic comedy of Duplicity.

Knowing

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Ben Mendelsohn

Directed by: Alex Proyas

Plot: Professor John Koestler discovers a set of random numbers that predicts disasters before they happen.

Rotten Tomatoes Freshness: 21%

Critic Consensus: Knowing has some interesting ideas and a couple good scenes, but it’s weighted down by its absurd plot and over-seriousness.

Duplicity

Starring: Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson

Directed by: Tony Gilroy

Plot: Two former spies are hired by two separate companies to secure a formula for a product that will be worth a fortune for whoever gets it.

RT Freshness: 65%

Critic Consensus: Duplicity is well-crafted, smart, and often funny, but it’s mostly more cerebral than visceral and features far too many plot twists.

I Love You, Man

Starring: Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg

Directed by: John Hamburg

Plot: Paul Rudd realizes he has no male friends who could be the best man at his upcoming wedding so he goes on a series of man dates to find one.

RT Freshness: 77%

Critic Consensus: I Love You, Man makes the most of its simple premise due to the heartfelt and hilarious performances of Paul Rudd and Jason Segel.

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