Knight and Day
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
Knight and Day is a romantic comedy starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. No, wait… that’s not right, it’s an action thriller about spies. Okay, you got me…it’s really a spy comedy with some action and (what the filmmakers want us to believe is) romance. The romance is practically non-existant though... there was just no chemistry between the two actors and they both seemed off their game. I’m not a huge fan of Tom Cruise, but he usually has some screen charisma and in this film it was missing. Likewise, Diaz is usually cute and bubbly, but not so much this time. In Cruise’s defense, he was playing a spy (with characteristics cribbed from the Bourne series) and it didn’t feel anything like the spy that he plays in the Mission Impossible franchise. (Incidentally, the last decent movie from Cruise was M:i:III because his tiny role in Tropic Thunder doesn’t count.)
Knight and Day was originally going to open on Friday, but less than three weeks before the scheduled date, Fox decided to bump up the release day to Wednesday. Decisions like this are made when the studios are worried about how their investments will perform at the box office. Apparently, they were specifically concerned with the marketing on this film. (This doesn’t surprise me a bit: first of all, I wasn’t aware that the release date had been moved and secondly, I never saw a single trailer for this film – even though I watch more films than the average person. I’ve seen the trailer for Grown Ups at least twice, just to put things in perspective.)
The story comes across as a first or second draft that could have been good with a little more work, but in actuality, there were about a dozen writers that worked on the script. As it is, the movie plays like it was patched together from a variety of different sources. It wants to be an over-the-top action comedy that plays like Mr. and Mrs. Smith or True Lies, but the tone is never quite right. It also wants to be a typical boy-meets-girl love story, but the action and spectacle distract from the romance. Not that the writers included much romance in the script. You pretty much just have to accept that the characters fall for each other on faith, because it’s not onscreen. And if you stop to think about any of the events in the film, it just completely falls apart on every level… just try to keep the gears in your mind from turning and maybe you can enjoy some of the ride.
- Score
- 5/10
Knight and Day is ridiculous on any sort of realistic level, the story is formulaic at best and you never know exactly what kind of movie it really wants to be… but at least it was an original story and not another sequel/remake/reboot/reimagining/rehash. That’s got to count for something. Plus, even though it plays on some of the tiresome events from earlier in the film, the ending of the movie works better than everything that came before… and I bumped my score up about a point because of it. It's worth experiencing, but the amount of unrealized potential in Knight and Day is scandalous and it wouldn’t have taken too much effort to fix the problems on the page before millions and millions of dollars were wasted on something that will ultimately be forgotten before the end of the year.
