If there’s one thing that has significantly changed the landscape of escapist filmmaking, it’s the move away from star-driven vehicles to franchise driven ones. Special effects, easily branded imagery and familiar rhythms are the elements that sell an audience on a franchise. Often there is a lack of energy and unpredictability that comes as a result of this trade-off. Filmmakers aren’t eager to break that contract with the viewer that promises what they are going to get is what they paid to see. Unfortunately, for the movie going audience, what we often get are pictures where the leads could be interchangeable.
Knight and Day looks to be a promising film, with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz leading the way. Also, there's just something about action-comedies that tickle us down to the bone (although we cannot say that the majority are genuinely great films). The pairing of Tom and Cameron seems to be perfect for this kind of film. Both are honed action stars with Cruise having countless action films to boot while Diaz having experience most prominently from the "Charlie's Angels" films. You also cannot discount the fact that both these stars featured successful comedy films. Can this dynamic duo bring life to a genre that is more miss than hit?
Knight and Day is the pinnacle of studio laziness: two pretty people forcefully crammed into an empty vessel in the hopes that their celebrity will dupe more than a few rubes into buying a ticket. This movie is lifeless; it has no pulse from beginning to end. I’m not naive. I know why movies like this exist and I know that I am not the target audience. But what really burns me about Knight and Day is that it fails to deliver on the one note on which movies like this typically bank: cheap romance.
Most of the absence of heat between them is a product of two veteran movie stars who obviously could not care less about the film they are making. If you are a fan of either Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz, I would highly suggest taking a trip to Madame Tussauds and staring at their wax likenesses because they will offer more skilled performances cast in wax than they did on screen. If Cruise’s performance were any more phoned in, AT&T would’ve sponsored the film. To counterbalance that, Diaz is a complete doorknob. Her “fish out of water” routine more often than not devolves into completely inauthentic stupidity and emotionless non-reactions. And I’m sorry, Tom, but even you have to exert yourself just an iota to be charming.
All of the action scenes have a kind of gee-whiz, tongue-in-cheek quality to them. We aren’t supposed to take them seriously or have them jar the back of our skull loose. They have been so skillfully constructed to reveal the seams, that we can only conclude following the smirking lead of Cruise that we are meant to be amused by them, and to laugh at the over-the-top nature of it all. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. Unlike the crunch and munch of Michael Bay’s insanely loud and depressingly stupid blockbusters, James Mangold’s movie pops, snaps and zings it’s way to the finish line, like a pinball machine with real human beings at the center.
Knight and Day is just deathly afraid of breaking out of the blockbuster mode, of providing anything risky or strange or out of the ordinary. Being ordinary is probably not the worst thing in the world, but it’s pretty difficult to build up any real enthusiasm for such a project. The most one can say about the film is that it’s competently constructed, that it does indeed fulfill the checklist of things that one must expect from a big summer blockbuster. That makes the movie a middling entertainment at best, doomed to be watched and immediately forgotten.
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