Another film review

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz? Really? Aren’t they both a little, er, old to be running around in mindless piffle like this?

Maybe this is the reality of recession-era Hollywood: actors who really should know better dragging their surgically-enhanced bums out of bed for a load of old rubbish called Knight and Day.

Because you just never know where the next $10 million is coming from.

Diaz’s June Havens does her ditzy but adorable schtick while repeatedly bumping into Cruise in an airport departure lounge.

He’s a good-looking stranger with an engaging way with a pickup line, and Diaz is quickly smitten.

By the time she emerges from the aircraft’s dunny to find that a) everybody else on the plane is dead, and b) it was Cruise what killed them, June is still inclined to believe Cruise’s “Roy Miller” when he tells her that he is the good guy on the run from corrupt government agents, and that only by sticking by him will she have any chance of staying alive herself.

Thus leaving the film’s many writers to spend the next two hours of your life stringing together a truly lunatic number of fights, stabbings, shootings and car chases, while Cruise and Diaz spend the occasional quiet moment looking into each other’s eyes and trying not to burst out crying at what’s happened to their careers.

Cruise has a McGuffin – in this case a perpetual battery – which he must protect from the forces of naughtiness, and Diaz turns out to be a half-decent fighter and a lucky shot.

Occasionally – and this is a huge copout for the writers – Cruise drugs Diaz into unconsciousness before mysteriously transporting her halfway around the world.

If you’ve been hankering to see “The Bourne Rom-Com” then Knight and Day is probably about as close as you’re ever going to get.

Director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) keeps the action percolating away nicely, but not even the most frenetic pace or lavishly orchestrated stunt sequence can disguise the fact that Knight and Day is an almost unbelievably stupid film.

I know that the moment this review appears online some outraged fanboy will be writing “it’s only escapism, it’s not supposed to Schindler’s List” in the comments section, and believe me, I get that.

But even mindless escapism needs to show a little respect for its audience.
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I liked The A-Team a few weeks back because although the stunts were outrageously silly, the characters’ motivations were believable, and so the film’s progress made some sort of sense. No-one’s expecting a film like

The A-Team or Knight and Day to obey the laws of physics or physiology, but the audience must at least be able to understand why the lead characters are acting in the way they do. Knight and Day fails that test.

With your brain in neutral, at the end of a long week, you might just about get through it without asking for your money back.
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