Hoping to sidestep the rash of lacklustre blockbusters with good old-fashioned Hollywood star-power, Knight and Day pairs reliable leads Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in a fast-paced spy- caper action comedy.
And while their combined wattage hasn’t proven much of a draw – the film has been languishing at the box office for three weeks, even achieving the dubious distinction of being the worst-opening Tom Cruise action film since 1986 – the globe-trotting genre-bender serves up its own blend of thrills and laughs unlike anything else this year.
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Knight and Day Directed by James Mangold |
Action-comedy has always been a tricky beast (Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl’s Killers opened last month to roundly negative reviews). Generally, the action is mediocre and the comedy too weak to have sustained a movie on its own. But if director James Mangold has produced a predictably inconsistent entry in the genre, it’s not without its strong points.
The story begins with June Havens (Diaz) literally bumping into Roy Miller (Cruise) at the airport as she heads home for her sister’s wedding. After witnessing Miller kill everyone else on their flight, from passengers to pilots – unaware that they were all agents sent to kill him – Havens finds herself swept up in a cloak-and-dagger plot surrounding a revolutionary energy source as government agents (Peter Sarsgaard and Viola Davis) pursue Miller and the device he possesses.
At first the film keeps its audience off kilter (with help from John Powell’s cheeky score) in a sort of limbo between humour and adrenaline: is this funny or deadly? The answer is quickly revealed to be both as Cruise and Diaz trade jibes and ripostes while inflicting death, damage, and general mayhem on the equivalent of a small city’s population. It’s thinly veiled black comedy but morbidly effective in its own blasé, damn-the-consequences sort of way.
The hodge-podge of a plot relies on the film’s stars to pull it through the tedious moments with pure charisma. To their credit, they do, with good chemistry from the pair (who worked together on 2001’s Vanilla Sky). But without any real gravity to the story, any depth to the characters beyond what serves the plot and the humour, the plot twists and double crosses carry little to no weight.
In particular, the plot device of Diaz being drugged and waking up later – usually after missing some presumably magnificent showdown or escape – grows immediately and severely tiresome. Coming at the action-movie template from the heroine’s perspective is a worthy enough idea, but the incessant blacking-out reduces it from a fresh take to an irksome narrative escape hatch.
By its end (the point where they are doing the kiss-kiss-bang-bang Brangelina routine from Mr. & Mrs. Smith), Knight and Day proves overlong. For a while it’s hard not to appreciate the film’s willingness to dismantle conjugal Happily Ever After clichés of the sort that close every bond – then you realize you’re only halfway through the third act and it has every intention of succumbing to precisely the boilerplate banalities it seemed intent on avoiding.
You will forgive it, in part, for the fun along the way, including a highway chase reminiscent of The Matrix Reloaded and The Island, though it doesn’t come close to topping them.
Like a frozen snack in the summer heat, Knight & Day is diverting enough before disappearing without a trace (nary an aftertaste, and no lingering head-scratching). As a rom-com puréed with a James Bond film, it offers a change of pace from the harder action of Predators, newly in theatres, and what promises to be a mind-bending thrill-ride from Christopher Nolan’s Inception, arriving this weekend.