Nicolas Cage learns that a piece of paper buried for years in a time capsule holds clues to impending catastrophes in this Friday’s Knowing, but it’s not the first time the Academy Award-winning thespian has had insight into forthcoming events. Just two years ago, Cage headlined Next, a loopy sci-fi saga in which his Cris can see two minutes into the future, a superpower that the government (here in the form of an out-of-place Julianne Moore) seeks to utilize in their efforts to locate a nuclear device hidden somewhere in downtown L.A. It didn’t take great prescience to see that this Lee Tamahori-helmed saga wouldn’t resuscitate Cage’s reputation as an overacting ham, as one look at his Da Vinci Code-long hair in the trailer made clear the film’s general lack of quality control. Yet anyone interested in an unpretentious B-movie could do far worse than this genre flick, despite the fact that the CG effects are so subpar they suggest that Paramount tightened the purse strings after watching dailies of Cage and love interest Jessica Biel attempt to generate (non-existent) romantic chemistry. Tamahori is reasonably adept at orchestrating action and his set pieces, especially one of Cris evading giant logs as he races down a hillside, are equal parts cheesy and thrilling. Cage, meanwhile, is his typically mannered, overwrought self whether in tense or quiet moments, which is another way of saying he’s consistently awesome-bad.