Film review: Knight and Day

Stars Cameron Diaz, Tom Cruise,Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Dano, Maggie Grace, Marc Blucas

Bringing together two of Hollywood’s most bankable stars for an old-fashioned romantic action comedy sounds like a recipe for hitting the summer box office jackpot, doesn’t it?

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz thrown together in a modern spy caper and into a love-hate relationship should create sparks that set the silver screen alight, shouldn’t they?

But unfortunately, the best you’ll get are some sparsely distributed glowing embers.

It all starts when the two literally bump into each other in the airport.

Loser-in-love June Havens (Diaz) immediately falls for the charms of the slick Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) but shady secret agent Miller sees her as an accessory useful for guarding an important item in his possession known as the Zephyr – a powerful everlasting battery.

Cruise is on the run from a traitor in the ranks and he must protect the Zephyr from falling into the wrong hands at all costs.

June is therefore inextricably drawn into a cat and mouse game, which sees her trust in Miller waiver and leaves her at the mercy of her growing romantic feelings for him.

Of course, this being in essence a rom-com, things can only go one way…

Everything counts on how the film manoeuvres itself from A to B – which places unavoidable importance on script, action and above all, chemistry between the two leads. Of which, there is none.

As much of the film would like you to think there is, there is no witty exchange of repartee and there is no apparent convincing mutual attraction.

Despite having teamed up before in Vanilla Sky, Cruise and Diaz feels like a seriously mismatched pairing.

Reasons for this include Diaz’s inconsistent character, who on the one hand comes across as a desperate, annoyingly girly stereotype and on the other is meant to be a tough, tomboyish, independent kook, as well as the lack of significant love scenes. This is hugely damaging.

We never see the extent or strength of their feelings for one another and therefore we find their romantic entanglement entirely implausible.

Knight and Day is one of three recent releases with similar subject matter. The Bounty Hunter, starring Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston, and Killers both covered the same ground and, although both were roundly panned, of the three, Killers is by far the best – buoyed such as it is by the spirited interplay between leads Ashton Kutcher and Katharine Heigl.

So where does this leave Knight and Day?

Billed as an old-fashioned style action comedy, it is weak in the areas it needs to be strongest.

An unfunny, uninspired script plus zero chemistry equals a by-numbers exercise in profit-prioritising moviemaking.

Formulaic and lacking invention, this movie star-heavy, care-light attempt to ignite the summer’s cinema screens is one summer ‘blockbuster’ to cruise past.

Source