Movie Review: Knight and Day

Butler had a chance to catch this romantic comedy/action-splosion-fest earlier in the week.  Will this movie make your long summer days? Find out after the jump!  


I have only recently found myself in a place where I can stand seeing Tom Cruise's smug, Xenu worshipping face on the screen.  Then there was Tropic Thunder, where we all got to watch in delight as Cruise played a raving, foul mouthed lunatic with a propensity for busting moves to Flo Rida's "Low".  Finally I realized something: the Tom Cruise of MY day (Mission: Impossible, Minority Report etc.) is gone and he probably isn't coming back.  However, there is a new Cruise on the block, and apparently his specialty is playing psychos.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense.

But don't get me wrong: when I bring up Tropic Thunder, I don't mean to imply that the role he plays in that film is at all similar to his role in Knight and Day.  I'm just pointing out when I feel the guy finally got his credibility back.  And this is credibility that he seems to be riding pretty comfortably on throughout Knight and Day.  If you have gone to the movies in the last few months, you probably saw the previews, which revealed about 75% of the substance of the plot (don't you hate it when they do that?), but I'll elaborate in case some of you are accessing the internet from mountain caves.

The film starts as a typical boy-meets-girl in a series of "random happenstances".  The girl, in this case is June Havens (played by Cameron Diaz), who has two seemingly accidental run ins with the charming Roy Miller (Cruise) in an airport before they coincidentally board the same flight.  The boy-meets-girl formula is then temporarily cast to the side in a scene wherein, while June is in the bathroom, Roy battles everyone on the plane in a series of ludicrously awesome stunts and some very tight fight choreography.  Long story short, Diaz survives the inevitable plane crash, where Roy tells her (right before she passes out from being drugged... by him) that he is a secret agent and that she is now in danger for having been associated with him.  She awakes in her bed the next morning only to be greeted by some men claiming to be with the government, headed up by an agent named Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard).  They claim Roy is unhinged and a rogue agent, but because of her feelings for Roy, she is skeptical.  Then Roy drops in and a ludicrous car chase ensues that will have you using only a small portion of the seat which you have paid for in full.

Like the guy on the left, minus the apparent brain damage

I'll cease my endless plot exposition for the time being, but I feel that this should give a pretty adequate idea of the pacing of the movie: character interactions/exposition followed by more explosions and Tom Cruise killing people than you thought could be possible in a movie where the phrase "summer romantic comedy" is applicable.  And while the formula does become fairly predictable, it doesn't stagnate as badly as you might think.  This is due to the charming performances by Cruise and Diaz in their respective elements.  Diaz is a very good "neurotic cute girl" archetype, having stereotypical "girly freakouts" in all of the action sequences, but unable to resist her co-star's allure.  Cruise, on the opposite end of the spectrum, delivers all of his lines like someone who has absolutely no understanding of how human emotions work.  I'm not at all saying this is a bad thing, and indeed, allows him to assume the simultaneous role of "straight man" and "comic relief".  Every line is deadpanned to Diaz, which first comes off as "super-spy charm", and slowly degenerates into delightful hollywood-style sociopathy, showing happiness only where it seems most awkward to do so, and addressing every other situation with casually knowledgeable sincerity.

And formulaic though it may be, in this particular case, the formula works surprisingly well.  The film does a very good job of balancing out the action and the romance plot lines, allowing them to have some overlap, but also giving them certain insular qualities for easy digestion, which is what this film is: easily digestible.  It's not perfect, it certainly doesn't break many molds, but it does a great job of dipping its feet into two separate pools and not killing itself trying to bridge the gap.  When it's a romantic comedy, it's charming, the characters are funny, and the corny part of you is rooting for them the whole way.  When it's an action flick, I daresay it is more "Mission: Impossible-y" than the last two Mission: Impossible movies.  Summation? I'm not saying run out and see this movie right now lest you be left to wallow in your cultural obsolescence, but if you've got a free evening and a few bucks, there are far worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

If you need more assurance of this film's casual absurdity,

this picture is not photoshopped.  This happens.