Knight and Day | Little White Lies

Knight and Day

05 Aug 2010 / Released: 06 Aug 2010

Two people - a blonde woman and a man with brown hair - holding handguns and aiming them in a dark setting.
Two people - a blonde woman and a man with brown hair - holding handguns and aiming them in a dark setting.
3

Anticipation.

Cruise and Diaz back together on the big screen!

2

Enjoyment.

Seen that before. And that. And that as well. Yawn.

2

In Retrospect.

About as memorable and entertaining as the last bath sponge I bought.

While you hard­ly expect a sum­mer block­buster to be mas­sive­ly orig­i­nal this film is so deriv­a­tive it’s almost ridiculous.

I am big. It’s the pic­tures that got small.” Glo­ria Swanson’s immor­tal line in Sun­set Boule­vard in ref­er­ence to her fad­ed star­dom seems strange­ly rel­e­vant to James Mangold’s sum­mer action­er. Instead of the pic­tures get­ting small­er, they’ve got­ten big­ger and – as Knight and Dayshows – the star pow­er that has been dom­i­nant in Hol­ly­wood through­out most of its his­to­ry is slow­ly being dimin­ished by the promise of spectacle.

Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller, a secret agent who inad­ver­tent­ly involves the inno­cent June Havens (Diaz) in a plot involv­ing an ever­last­ing pow­er source, evil drug barons and shady gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions. Soon Havens finds her­self accom­pa­ny­ing the mys­te­ri­ous Miller to numer­ous exot­ic locales as they avoid the bad guys and slow­ly find them­selves falling for one another.

Whilst you hard­ly expect a sum­mer block­buster to be mas­sive­ly orig­i­nal Knight and Day is so deriv­a­tive it’s almost ridicu­lous. There are bits of the Bourne­fran­chise, smat­ter­ings of Michael Bay and a tonne of clichés from almost every spy/​action film ever made. It makes for a film that is – nar­ra­tive­ly and visu­al­ly – so pre­dictable and staid that you’re wait­ing for some kind of epic twist. But it nev­er comes. Indeed, to make the film even slight­ly enjoy­able, it would take stars with great charis­ma pres­ence to car­ry pro­ceed­ings along.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, these two stars are not Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.

Cruise tries to play it cool and non­cha­lant through­out. But he comes across as an insuf­fer­able prick who you’d glad­ly betray to the ene­my just to wipe the smug grin off his face. Diaz (giv­en the insuf­fer­able a girl who works as an engi­neer, so she’s actu­al­ly quite tough’ trope that smacks of lazi­ness) smiles and pouts, but there’s no spark with her co-star. It almost feels as if she’s pur­chased a new home and this is mere­ly a means to pay off the mortgage.

A few years ago, putting Cruise and Diaz togeth­er on the big screen would be enough for an audi­ence to flock to the cin­e­ma in drones. Nowa­days, as audi­ences get hooked on 3D and ever more elab­o­rate CGI FX, it seems that the big stars can’t car­ry a film by name alone. Some Hol­ly­wood agents must be very ner­vous indeed.

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