For a movie with absolutely no sense of humour, Alex Proyas’s sci-fi action thriller manages to raise a few laughs. Sadly, they are at, rather than with, this lumbering story of a world about to self-destruct.

The premise at least is intriguing. A new elementary school buries a time capsule filled with the children’s ideas of what the future might hold. A strange little girl, who looks as if she’s straight out of a horror movie, merely writes out a series of numbers. Fifty years later a young boy finds the code in the capsule and his dad, an astrophysics professor (Nicolas Cage), cracks it. He finds that it predicts every natural or unnatural disaster in perfect sequence.

He thus knows the fate of the world and desperately tries to prevent it. He is helped when he finds the daughter (Rose Byrne) and granddaughter (Chandler Canterbury) of the now deceased author of the prophecies. If he can’t save himself, he is determined to save his son.

A little Cage often goes a long way, and it does here in a palpably overlong movie. But Proyas, who also wrote the screenplay, provides two notable action sequences: one of a plane crash and the other of a train disaster, both foretold. What we get after that goes into the realms of pure science fiction and loses credibility.

Knowing, though the story of disasters, isn’t a total disaster itself. It’s just too ambitious for its own good.