Movie Review: Knight and Day
by KYW's Bill Wine
He's an extraordinary man in ordinary circumstances, she's an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances. They're as different as night and day, but they're the ordinary lead couple in this decidedly ordinary movie.
Knight and Day is a globetrotting romantic action comedy that signals us early on not to take any of this stuff seriously.
They needn't have worried: with this many breakdowns in continuity and gaps in narrative logic as each scene segues to the next with no explanation or connective tissue offered, we come nowhere close to buying anything being pitched at us.
Tom Cruise stars as Roy Miller, a highly trained covert agent who keeps "accidentally" bumping into everywoman June Havens, played by Cameron Diaz, at the Wichita, Kan. airport.
In a terribly transparent bit of illogic, she joins him on a near-empty flight to Boston, where she is scheduled for a gown fitting for her sister's wedding.
Then, while she's in the plane's restroom -- which must be one heck of a soundproof facility -- Roy exchanges bullets with the few passengers aboard and the entire crew, including the pilots, dispenses with them one and all, and lands the now-empty plane in a cornfield.
What June soon finds out is that Roy is protecting a young scientist who has invented a special battery, an unlimited power supply that lots of suspicious folks want to get their hands on.
Naturally, what the FBI authorities claim is that Roy is an agent who has gone rogue. Roy begs to differ.
Talented director James Mangold has made his share of respectable and entertaining genre films (3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line, Cop Land) but his is not exactly a light touch, and the snap, crackle, and pop of this kind of violent but lighthearted comic action -- from June and Roy's meet-cute tipoff right through to the climactic final whistle -- eludes him.
A plot that should feel breezy registers instead as labored.
The director couldn't get much more in terms of charm and energy from Cruise and Diaz, who worked onscreen together in 2001's Vanilla Sky.
Cruise plays a preposterously resourceful and seemingly invulnerable combatant, an island of calm in an ocean of chaos, while Diaz's June is always on the verge of justifiable paranoia and understandable panic.
But the script by Patrick O'Neill is so overwrought, the action so relentless, and the appeal to pure action junkies so transparent that the film often resembles a cross between a video game and a shooting gallery. So neither the two leads nor any of the supporting characters -- played by the credentialed likes of Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis, and Paul Dano -- even approaches three-dimensional life.
As for the many stunts-and-special-effects-fueled action scenes, which comprise a nonstop parade of set pieces that quickly becomes tiresome, at no time during any of them do the natural laws of physics even remotely apply. At this gathering of the family Overkill, plausibility isn't even a distant cousin.
The underemployed Cruise and Diaz are just too charismatic and authoritative to become mere walking props, but that's exactly the duty they're relegated to. Mangold doesn't let them come to life or reveal themselves or really connect with each other because he's always occupied with getting them in position for the next car chase, gun battle, or incendiary explosion.
Cruise, still a remarkable screen presence, may be trying a bit too hard to reestablish himself as a larger-than-life star. And Diaz probably overplays the innocence a tad. But they're nonetheless watchable stars who certainly deserve better support behind the cameras.
So we'll turn rogue with 2 stars out of 4 for a cartoonish and juvenile romantic caper. Cruise and Diaz learn to trust each other long before we trust the script they're forced to shoulder in Knight and Day.
