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What it's about:
June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is trying to catch a flight home to Boston to attend her baby sister's wedding. At the airport she bumps, literally, into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), a secret agent with a target on his back, put there by his own people. Roy ropes the hapless June into his manic, globetrotting mission to stay alive while protecting an eccentric scientist and his groundbreaking discovery.
What we thought:
What a great position Tom Cruise is in now, 30 years into his enviable career. He has the ear of every influential director and producer in Hollywood. In fact, he is one of them. And with every move he makes he has our undivided attention. When Tom Cruise has a new movie out, you know about it and chances are you're dying to see it.
And chances are you've seen this movie already, because there is little to distinguish Roy Miller from Ethan Hunt, John Anderton or even Jerry Maguire. Cruise is all about control, and in Knight and Day he presents his most preposterously over-baked action spectacle to date – although it's safe to say that the 2011 release of Mission: Impossible IV will go out of its way to outdo all that came before.
It is a difficult, nay, unpleasant task to navigate one's way through the flimsy bits and pieces that make up Knight and Day. There are the long, meandering opening scenes that try to set up the conceit of June's introduction to Roy and her obvious attraction to this man she knows nothing about but is irrefutably charmed by. And how can she not be? Roy might be a finely tuned killing machine with lightning-quick reflexes, but he's also very polite and caring, talking June through their latest dilemma in calm, measured tones while assassins are raining a hail of bullets overhead. It's like Cruise had been enjoying a 24 DVD marathon and hoped to bring that badass Jack Bauer persona to the big screen, but with more sitcom-y humour and bikini shots.
And no, that's no bad thing at all. This is slick, high octane escapism and Cruise and Diaz are more than capable of winning audiences over with their light repartee and über-white smiles. But Knight and Day also fancies itself as an exotic European caper along the lines of James Bond and The Italian Job and starts to groan under the weight of the ever-intensifying action sequences. Each death-defying stunt seems to scream "Are you not entertained?" as Cruise gets into one ridiculous brawl after another in moving planes, trains and automobiles while hopping from the States, to Austria, to some tropical island in the middle of nowhere. It's all far too exhausting.
Nothing is more disappointing than watching a film filled with this much potential to shock and awe audiences instead choose to revel in its own superficiality, like a puppy dog desperate for attention. Only the film's lead stars seem to be having any fun, leaving Viola Davis and Peter Sarsgaard to do all the heavy lifting.
I challenge you to figure out why this movie is even called Knight and Day, or recall a single defining moment in this loud, hyperkinetic mess. And no, Cruise taking the time to show off his hard-won physique doesn’t really count.
