The awful Nicolas Cage movie Roger Ebert adored: “When it needs to be, rather awesome”
By and large, movie critics generally tend to settle into a consensus about a film: this is good, this is bad, this is middling. Every now and again, though, a film divides the critical community and leads to intense debate on both sides. However, on even rarer occasions than that, there is a movie that is widely derided by almost every critic worth their salt – except one, who makes a stand by firmly planting their flag and saying, “This movie is good. You’re all wrong.” The great Roger Ebert did this in 2009 with a Nicolas Cage movie that was lambasted from pillar to post. Hell, he even wrote follow-up articles bemoaning the taste of his fellow critics.
When Cage teamed up with The Crow and Dark City director Alex Proyas for a sci-fi thriller dealing with the end of the world, there was significant cause for optimism. Proyas has never been a filmmaker who just pumps out material, and he hadn’t made a film since 2004’s I, Robot, so it stood to reason that he was passionate about this script. Similarly, at that time, Cage had yet to tumble into his direct-to-DVD wilderness years and could still be relied upon to deliver good box office returns with his action movies.
The film was, of course, Knowing, which saw Cage play a professor who finds a list of strange numbers in a time capsule that seems to predict worldwide disasters. Unfortunately, even though it did respectable business at the box office, the reviews were crushingly negative, with the plot being dismissed as absurd, Cage’s “fright wig” laughed at, and the movie’s po-faced tone derided.
This was all a shock to Ebert, though, who filed his review immediately after watching the film on the Monday before its release. He legitimately loved the film, awarding it his full four stars and gushing, “Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I’ve seen — frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.” He found Proyas’ storytelling to be “expert and confident” and felt the tension was kept at a fever pitch for the entire runtime. He found Cage compelling in “another wound-up, edgy performance” and felt the special effects were sensational.
After being “blindsided” by the avalanche of negativity toward the movie he raved about, Ebert wrote a follow-up article addressing the disparity in opinion. With his opening gambit, Ebert wrote, “Either I’m wrong, or most of the movie critics in America are mistaken. I persist in the conviction that Alex Proyas‘s Knowing is a splendid thriller and surprisingly thought-provoking.”
Ebert acknowledged that the movie’s plot is absurd, but he maintained, “That’s part of the charm.” He explained that in normal circumstances, he’d been known to pick apart the logical inconsistencies in films, but Knowing kept him so engrossed that he “simply didn’t care” if some of it didn’t make much sense.
To the esteemed critic, complaints about Knowing boiled down to two aspects: Cage and the reading of the film as a Biblical allegory. He couldn’t get on board with the first complaint, partly because he’s always been a Cage fan but also because he felt that eccentricity perfectly suited this film. “Cage has two speeds, intense and intenser,” Ebert wrote. “I like both speeds. I find him an intriguing actor because he takes chances.”
Amazingly, he then took a shot at Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney, all of whom he has “great affection” for. However, he argued they simply couldn’t do what Cage does in Knowing, which is akin to being “a lion-tamer on a high wire.” As he put it, “Anybody can play the ringmaster.” Oh, and he also took umbrage with the “fright wig” comment from one of his fellow reviewers, which he dubbed “mean-spirited snark.”
Some critics argued that the movie had religious overtones, citing the Book of Ezekiel as a model and seemingly taking this as a negative, but Ebert didn’t see it as such. He acknowledged that he noticed the Biblical themes and wondered if the aliens shown at the end were actually supposed to be angels. However, he appreciated that the movie left the audience with as many questions as answers. “The ending is spectacular enough that it brings closure if not explanation,” Ebert wrote. “I don’t have to know if the beings are aliens or angels. Nobody in the movie does.”
To his credit, Ebert doubled down on his opinion and wrote a third piece about the film: a blog entry that engendered lots of discussion on his website’s talkback section. In response to one reader asking, “Do you feel frustrated or intimidated when you are out there by yourself?” Ebert responded unequivocally: “Not when I’m right.”
