That's three hours we'll never get back!

Having seen only bits of other Nicholas Cage movies I was looking forward to seeing all of "Knowing", his latest effort. Internet reviews were, however, not exactly promising and seemed to indicate (not always politely) that this film is a piece of cheese.

The premise is that a young oddball girl (she hears voices) fills a sheet of paper with apparrently random numbers. This, along with her classmates' more conventional efforts at artwork, is buried in a time capsule in front of her newly-established school. 50 years on, when the capsule is opened, Cage's son acquires the sheet and brings it home.

A stroke of great fortune sees Cage, an MIT scientist and lecturer, recognise that within the apparently random clutch of figures lie clues to the last fifity-years' worth of disasters, their location and number of people killed in each. The fortune comes not in the discovery itself, but that it took place at all, given that he was outside of the best part of half a bottle of scotch when the penny dropped. Equally astonishing, he drives several children to school early the following morning, a few short hours after having been clattered. A little later, similarly soaked, he realises that the left over numbers (whose meaning has so far escaped him) set out upcoming terminal events.

From this point on a fairly unremarkable story unfolds: plenty of bangs, crashes, shouting and running about, all propped up by some rather good special effects, but the last third of the film comes straight out of left field and is left incomplete only by the absence of Chico Marx and his bulb-horn.

There are all sorts of little allegories running round loose here, but they are so light-weight that it is probably only the air-crash sequence (and whoever CGI'd that has spent too much time on You Tube) and some New York subway carnage that earns this film its '15' certificate.

Two-thirds of this film are OK and, despite everything, I'm glad we forked out to see it (but only because it will be interesting to hear the views of colleague, who is going tomorrow).