Knight and Day (A Review)
Screened @ United Artists Riverview Plaza Stadium 17, Tuesday, June 22nd.
So Tom Cruise has fully entered the self-parody phase of his career. First we had the Les Grossman, then came… uh Les Grossman and of course the news came out earlier this month that he will star in a Les Grossman film! But between squeezing every last drop from those fat-suit enhanced utters he managed to fit in this too-clever-for-its-own-good film.
The romantic-espionage-action-comedy-thriller plot starts in Kansas as Cameron Diaz hops a plane early to get to her sister’s impending wedding. This, obviously, was a mistake. The plane is passaged by Cruise and a dozen or so people trying to kill him. As Diaz steps into a restroom to give herself a pep talk, Cruise dispatches the attackers, including both pilots. The plane soon lands in a cornfield (Kansas, remember?) which our heroes walk away from… but not before Diaz is drugged and mysteriously wakes up in her own place in Boston, setting up the most successful element of the script. From there there’s the requisite intrigue, MacGuffining, accented baddies and globetrotting to fabulous locales!
Knight and Day plays to Diaz’ strengths as the funny, blond type that made her a star in the first place. She gets to act alternately ditzy and self assured and has great chemistry with Cruise. Oh, and she fixes 70’s muscle cars for some reason, I believe this is important in one very minor plot point. In a film that tries to be all things to all people, the Rom-Com angle works pretty flawlessly.
Of course the more interesting angle stems from screenwriter Patrick O’Neill (or whoever else was on the project over the length of its development), taking the Mission: Impossible formula and tweaking it into parody. There is a fight sequence on a train that includes the baddie getting knocked out of the window… except he hangs onto sausage links to save himself! These kind of lame jokes are minimal though and are an afterthought to the films greatest asset – taking the set pieces that make the Mission: Impossible films so compelling and having them take place off screen. Trough the use of drugs and Vulcan neck pinching (!), Diaz is unconscious for the most harrowing escapes in the film waking up intermittently over the course of a couple days (it’s a really strong neck pinch) just so that we can chuckle at the snippets events that she and we are missing out on. Imagine the Langley break-in starts and then it just cuts to Cruise walking out with the NOC list. It’s a fairly genius approach which is even carried through on the film’s poster with its empty white figures where images of the stars should be. The use of a battery, of all things, plays great as the MacGuffin as well. It’s so incredibly useless inherently that the fact that it drives and even ends the plot has to be seen as a winking nod to the genre. And a scene where Cruise walks back though a rain of incoming fire (that he just duck & covered his way past) to prove his love for Diaz shows that this is a film that should never be taken seriously.
So what happens when subtracting the suspense from an international espionage film? Well, you’re left with Cruise’s inherent smarminess. This is an unfortunate remainder that hurts an otherwise half-decent film. Cruise has to turn up that thousand kilowatt smile and act all over-the-top “Cruisy,” and frankly it’s just off-putting. The also go to the well one to many times and the parody elements begin to wear thin – though this is more of a problem with the genre in general. Mangold’s use of bad CG is also on the list of offences on display here. The climactic chase (motorcycle v. smartcars) features laughably rendered bulls charging though the streets of Spain and providing obstacles for our heroes. The uninspired decision to ramp the action up to this kind of preposterous level should never have been made, even if this was a full-on parody, this is dumb silly, not smart silly.
Over-all, Knight and Day is more of a mixed bag than anything else - actually, it’s a pureed blend of a whole bunch of things. Some of them are even good. But it feels like a shopping list of studio pitch notes rather than a combination intended to genuinely satisfy, and even if that’s the intent it still just doesn’t feel right – to much was compromised to get it made and the whole package suffers as a result.
C
