Nicolas Cage movies generally fall into in two categories: intentionally funny (Raising Arizona ), and unintentionally funny (The Wicker Man ). However, Knowing is neither of these. Knowing uses Cage as a regular actor to portray a regular guy…and that, my friends, the least entertaining path to take.

It all begins with in 1959 with a Wednesday Adams look-alike (the painfully cute Laura Robinson), with sad eyes and a large forehead, looking very worried. When her teacher presents a time capsule project for her class, the girl hears voices (of course) telling her to write down a series of numbers, instead of drawing the future like she was told.

Fifty years later, physics professor Johnathan Koestler’s (Cage) smarter-than-average (read: amazingly argumentative) son Caleb (Chandler Cantebury) gets the numbers, and things start getting nuts. Koestler figures that a lot of the numbers are the dates and body counts for natural disasters,but he’s not sure what the other numbers mean… yet.

By now we’re expecting a classic Nic Cage style freak-out (“HOW’D IT GET BURNED!?! “), and instead we‘re disappointed by him actually doing a rather decent job with a well-realized character. Koestler and his son have a strained relationship, as his wife died in a hotel fire, and naturally they both miss her dearly. They never talk about things like “emotions” outside of a painfully sweet exchange in sign language exchange, being men and all.

Koestler throws himself into trying to solve the mystery using the “Single Barrel“ Research Method, which involves crawling into a bottle and watching the news for any headlines matching the numerical pattern.  After doing this all night, he sleeps through a whole day and wakes up to his son calling, saying he has afternoon car-pool. CRAP! Off he goes to get stuck in highway traffic, still contemplating what all the numbers mean when he realizes, after looking at his GPS, those other numbers are map coordinates: latitude and longitude... like the one he’s on right NOW. A few seconds after this realization, a 747 crashes, dipping its wing into the Earths’ crust and cutting a trench through that very highway.

Koestler tries in vain to help these people, and we still don’t get that freak out we’ve been waiting for! His next step is to seek out Diana Wayland (Rose Byrn), the daughter of Worried Wednesday from the opening. She too has a daughter (Robinson again). Koestler tries to get Wayland to open up about her dead crazy mother and reveal the secret to life, the universe, and everything.

The exchange begins poorly, of course, but later they hit it off just in time for Koestler to figure out that there’s a massive Solar flare heading for Earth and everyone’s going to die unless. . . well, nothing. You can’t really stop the sun from reducing the Earth to a heavy metal album cover, but the movie still has forty-five minutes to go. What happens is a half interesting, half Deus-Ex Machina-but with a fiercely depressing twist.

Overall, this movie suffers from a case of “Not Quite Enough-itis.” While director Alex Proyas (I, Robot , Dark City ) is not short on directing skill or adorable brunettes in various stages of life, the plot is pretty much “figure out the code, realize it’s hopeless and do NOT give us a Nicolas Cage Freakout in spite of this.”  It’s competent enough, but asks heavy questions and presents some crazily optimistic answers, playing it fairly straight the entire time with no zany antics and few ludicrous moments. As such, it might not work for a Cavalcade, so go with NeXt instead.

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The Setup

While we’ve never devoted a Cavalcade to a single actor, there is no doubting the greatness of Bruce Willis. Born in 1955, Willis is the son of an American soldier and German Bank Teller, and at that time-well-WWII was just yesterday, so he is the product of a hope for a better world.

Willis overcame a stutter in high school, worked as a security guard for a nuclear power plant, worked as a private investigator, and finally was able to wrestle the American Dream to the ground, punch it in the head and get it to cast him in something. Yes, Bruce Willis is the Father of Modern Action Cinema. But, could he also be. . . A Messiah?

A man born of two very different cultures, Willis overcame personal handicap and personal danger to go onto fame and fortune and a degree of humility unseen in Hollywood since its Gold Age?

Yes. There is a promised land, and if we follow the example of Bruce Willis, we will find ourselves there. His Gospel is available to all (for 3.99 a pop a Blockbuster). Hard work, dedication, a lack of self-seriousness and guns. Lots of them.

The Formula

Write a screenplay, give it Bruce Willis, film the result. It’s not brain-science, people.

• Something will blow up. Willis always manages to blow something up or at least set it on fire.
• Willis will get beat up. Established in Die Hard, Willis takes his lumps in every movie he’s in, proving he can take it as well as dish it out.
• There will be one-liners. Willis has a line delivery style somewhere between the old Catskills style and a world-weary cop
• Willis will always play a tough guy. Even when he’s not a tough guy, he’s still pretty tough.

The Menu

In addition to our typical selection of chips, beer, liquor, and snacks-there will be:

The Booze: The Rusty Nail

• 1 1/2 oz Scotch
• 1/2 oz Drambuie
• 1 twist of Lemon peel

That’s right, a manly drink for a ridiculously manly event devoted to the manliest of men, the Rusty Nail. A hard, mean, but surprisingly smooth cocktail whose secret ingredient is moxie.

The Food: Pizza and Wings

Seriously, nothing fancy here for our hero Bruce Willis. He keeps it simple: protein and carbs so has plenty of muscle energy to wipe out a whole legion of goons.

The Movies

Hudson Hawk (1991): Willis made this extremely silly and fun movie coming out of his high flying years of the 80’s. It universally panned by uncaring public due to being a very silly movie about the thief named Eddie who sings songs with fellow thief Tommy (Danny Aiello) during capers, until he is roped into doing a job for the CIA by his old nemesis George Caplan (James Coburn), who is actually working for The Mayflowers (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard). Willis made this picture for the fun of it, and if you approach it as intentionally fun, well, it’s hysterical.

Color Of Night (1994): Willis decides to play a more subdued role as a psychologist who is traumatized when one his patients commits suicide after he more or less tells her to do so. He decides to go into therapy, not learning from his own mistake, and meets a gaggle of silly stereotypes. He also begins dating a nymphomaniac named Rose (Jane March) who provides that special kind of healing described by Marvin Gaye. A deliriously weird “psychological thriller” with an absurd plot twist and Ruben Blades, this was a Showtime staple for years.

Suggested Alternatives

Planet Terror (2007): Willis plays a rough and tough lieutenant in charge a platoon of soldiers who melt if they don’t get their Zombie Gas.

Die Hard (1988): The Granddaddy of Modern action, and the movie that elevate Willis to well deserved stardom, this is a classic.

Armageddon (1998): Michael Bay’s magnum opus of ridiculously bad action movies. Asteroid meet Earth. Earth, meet asteroid.

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How do you make a Sci-fi movie these days? 1 oz super powerful aliens, 1 oz environmental message, shake well, garnish with nanomachines.

Everything goes to hell the day astrobiologist Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) summons the Goblin King to take her son (Jaden Smith) away. Instead, she gets Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), who doesn’t take the child, but rather decides it’s time to wipe out humanity to preserve the Earth. He doesn’t even sing about it, which is kind of a bummer.

Klaatu shows up in a rubber organic space suit, and some idiot decides the best way to communicate with a brand new life form is with a bullet. This pisses off a giant Sentinel thing and sends out a wave of pain, giving the unarmed people a chance to medevac the alien before it molts into Keanu Reeves. Klaatu then has a meeting  with the Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates), who finds that while he’s not openly hostile, he doesn’t recognize that Earth belongs to humanity. Turns out all this polluting we’ve been doing is bad, and somewhere there is a council of beings who aren’t too happy about it, as the number of planets in the universe that can support complex life is quite limited.

The fact that this never seen council even thinks that shows the screen writer did his job. The dialogue is sharply written and well delivered, and they also didn’t do anything stupid like cast Tara Reid or Denise Richards as scientists. It’s pretty fascinating to see a believable sequence of events that may surround an alien encounter. This is embodied in the performance by Kathy Bates, who accuses the alien who just landed on earth-you know from another galaxy-of violating U.S. air space. Yeah. Not seeing the big picture. The second time she says that historically, when two civilizations meet, the more primitive one is either enslaved or destroyed. Now you’ll pardon me, but if a super-advanced alien race gave us the option, I’d vote for enslavement and immediately begin planning a Spartacus. Pick you battles, I say. But I digress.

So Klaatu meets with his contact, an operative who has lived on Earth for 70 years and the dude pretty much says, “yeah, wipe out humanity, except that I lurv them, and you’ll never understand.” This conversation is mostly in Chinese, and Reeves shows that his accent is quite impeccable.

The rest of the movie is more or less Klaatu learning what love is so he will spare humanity from a nasty death by nanomachines. There are a few veryeffective scenes, and some more good acting from Jaden Smith, but really it’s just sitting through one boring-as-crackers effects sequence after another to see how they arrive at the conclusion we all know is coming. So while It’s is pretty well done, it has a heavy-handed seriousness (John Cleese even makes an appearance that doesn’t involve being funny). but with the right crowd you’ll probably be able to pull some laughs from the material. Professional Cavalcaders only need apply.