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NEW YORK -- Nicolas Cage's latest film "Knowing" is neither as bad as you suspect nor as good as you secretly hope. It's just a perfectly fine way to waste a rainy Sunday afternoon, which is actually saying something for a Nicolas Cage film these days.

Everyone knows how up-and-down Cage's career has been over the past decade. He zigzags from being a respectable actor making interesting choices to being a mercenary going after big paydays in trash. Coming in the wake of his pair of "National Treasure" films, I expected "Knowing" to be another crummy cash grab, but that's not so.

Cage stars as a hangdog widower whose son, played by Chandler Canterbury, finds a coded set of numbers scrawled 50 years earlier in a time capsule recently dug up at his school. Since Cage also happens to be a professor of astrophysics at MIT (I don't buy it either), he quickly figures out that this list of numbers is actually a prophecy of past and future disasters like earthquakes, plane crashes and even 9/11.

Before you can say "Nostradamus," Cage is racing off to prevent the next foretold disaster from happening. He doesn't have much time to spare, because looming at the end of the list is the ultimate apocalypse.

Granted, it's a pretty ho-hum ticking clock premise, but director Alex Proyas, who made the overlooked and wonderfully bizarre 1998 sci-fi flick "Dark City," sprinkles in just enough "Close Encounters"-style weirdness to keep things interesting, or at least unpredictable. You could do a lot worse, which isn't a ringing endorsement, but for a Nicolas Cage movie might as well be a rave.

Now for a look at what else is new on DVD: in "Che," Benicio del Toro plays iconic revolutionary Che Guevara; in "The Haunting in Connecticut," we get a dippy Hollywood horror movie; and in "REC," we get a much scarier one, this one imported from Spain.