My parents warned me against drugs, strangers with sweets and seeing films with puns in the title. This is sound advice, reinforced by this rather silly and pointless venture. Tom Cruise long ago became a self-parody. The irony is, on the rare times he plays against type, as in Tropic Thunder and Magnolia he delivers his best performances. Here he plays a covert agent Roy Miller sent on an impossible mission, or should that be mission impossible? But of course it’s Cruise, so nothing’s impossible. Except apparently getting injured, even while strolling through a hailstorm of bullets or crashing in a plane or any of the other myriad deadly situations he finds himself in.
Billed as a comedy, Knight and Day is only funny because of how ludicrous it is. Possessed of a rather hokey, corny sensibility, it feels better suited to the TV than the movie screen. Director James Mangold boasts a decent resume that includes Walk the Line and Girl, Interrupted, but one void of the lightweight, jokey tone he was trying to convey here. There is little plot to speak of and what there is is rather flimsy and garbled. The action sequences are all deliberately over the top, thus undermining their impact, and the relationship between Miller and his unwitting accomplice, June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is stilted at best.
Their alliance begins at an airport when Miller uses the unknowing Havens to smuggle something through customs. The something, which for the purposes of this movie could have been anything, turns out to be a powerful prototype battery. Inevitably there are other people who are after this revolutionary device and Miller, including the federal agent Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard).
Miller’s indestructibility is so pronounced as to give him an air of being a superhero, but without a cool costume. Completely relaxed, even in the tightest situation, he exudes a nonchalant air even as he eliminates hordes of armed assassins. There’s a discernible wink in acknowledgment that it’s all rather cartoonish in nature but the joke is rarely amusing. It’s hard to gauge what kind of parallel universe this is all taking place in. While superficially it resembles normality, nothing normal ever takes place and it has more the mood of a video game than real life.
Diaz and Cruise rarely click as a couple, in part because the character of Miller is so enigmatic as to be soulless. Screenwriter Patrick O’Neill fails to provide anything in the way of charm to ignite a spark between the two. All the attempted cute moments feel thoroughly predictable and contrived. Cruise is never one to exude much in the way of personality and Diaz has long ago lost what natural exuberance she once possessed. It’s difficult to gauge what Mangold was striving for, but whatever is was, it remained elusive. And as for the title, well the only relation it has to the film is more to do with its apparent length than the story.
Kevin Murphy
