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Year:	2009
Country of origin:	USA / UK / Australia
Director:	Alex Proyas
Genre:	Equus thickness
Starring:	Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne
Rating:	1/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448011/
Tagline:	What Happens When The Numbers Run Out?
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

A sci-fi movie starring Nicholas 'Equus' Cage.
Got to be good, right?

The plot:
Cage plays Alan Strang, a young man with a religious and pathological fascination with horses. Strang, you see, is a zoophile, though his proclivities are not sexually based, rather a tactile compulsion he finds so overpowering that, one day, to ensure the horses do not run away, he blinds them. Seven horses in all, one after the other; Strang sneaks up on the wretched beasts, penknife cupped in sweaty palm, jabbing the weapon into the eyes of the docile animals with a speed and level of savagery that renders them powerless.
Hang on.
No, sorry, got it all wrong.
I'm talking about the Peter Schaffer play.
Let's reset:
Cage plays John Koestler, a teacher and deep thinker (Cage. Right?!?). John's son brings home something from school; a sheet of paper, taken from a time capsule unearthed fifty years after the pupils at his school buried it and, on the paper, a sequence of numbers, apparently random.
Through a moment of genuine logical insanity, John spots that the numbers appear to be a series of dates and, after a quick dose of Googling, he discovers that each date is significant as a tragedy took place that day, involving the loss of many lives and, shock horror, the sequence of numbers also predict the precise figure of fatalities.
How could this be?
How could a pupil, fifty years prior, have predicted the dates and death tolls of so many horrific incidents and, more pressingly, how can John prevent the tragedies the numbers predict are yet to come.

Directed by Alex 'The Crow, Dark City' Proyas, I had reasonably high hopes going into this. Yeah, it would be a special effects splurge and, yeah, Equus can't act his way out of a revolving door, but the pedigree of the man at the helm seemed a good omen. Boy, was I wrong.
Blatantly silly in ways that are genuinely offensive to the viewer - I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but I expect to be treated like a growed up - this is a movie that absolutely depends upon the gullibility, naivety and general stupidity of the viewer.
What's that?
Equus braying on about sequences of numbers?
And how did he spot it?
Because of a coffee stain?
Shut it, Mr. Ed. Get back in the stable where you belong lest I turn you into glue and food for things with sharper teeth than yours....
What's that?
Aliens, you say, communicating across the stars to teach humanity, and to save those worthy of saving?
I fucking warned you, Trigger. Take that. And that. And that. That'll teach you to have such spindly legs. Try and escape now, you pointy-eared little prick.
What am I doing?
I'll tell you exactly what I'm doing.
I've cut you on your flank and led a trail of sugar from the wound to an ant's nest.
Now we'll see who's laughing.
Stay down, you fucking worthless animal.
With lashings of 'family values' and sentimentalising, if this one doesn't have you spraying geysers of vomit across the room by the end, Linda Blair style, frankly, there's something wrong with you.
And the ending?
Clit-licking Jesus.
The ending.
With a schmaltz factor that even Spielberg couldn't tolerate, the icky-sticky-dickyness of a father's love for his son will send anyone sentient into paroxysms of exquisite agony as it goes on and on and on and on.
One of the worst movies I have seen in quite some time, I was left a quivering, raging mess of boiling hatred by the end of it.
Utter, utter shit.