Imagine a film in which a secret agent falls in love with an “everyday girl” and together they must defeat bad guys before escaping to a picturesque, fairytale life. How unique, right? Well, maybe not SO unique. Seeing as that happens in the recent chick flick Killers, it might have been the plot of True Lies, and come to think of it, it's pretty similar to The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Now that incredibly original premise has been rehashed yet again in James Mangold's Knight and Day.
Cameron Diaz is June Havens, an innocent air traveller who becomes entangled with spook Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) after he uses her as a pawn in a high security operation. When Miller realizes that his agency thinks he's a traitor and wants him dead, he goes rogue to save their lives and together they travel the globe to evade assassins hoping to steal a special battery in their possession.
Thank goodness Hollywood is so innovative.
Despite my sarcasm, I don't think Knight and Day is awful. There are moments of decent acting (though I wish Paul Dano and Peter Sarsgaard had more screen time), especially when Cameron Diaz simply has to seem ditzy--her typical modus operandi. There are even snippets of humor, which are apparently so brief that no specific lines come to mind. The action, a predominant part of the film, is admittedly fun--but over-the-top to a point where the laws of physics don't apply. As a result, Knight and Day becomes more of a super hero film rather than one about a struggling mortal.
Tom Cruise is charming, of course, but his casual confidence quickly becomes cartoonish and a little cheesy. He appears to be an invincible man, and it's hard for the viewer to stay engaged when the danger seems so remote. It is one thing to disarm a guy on a plane using a seatbelt, but it's another to take out hoards of special agents while riding on top of an out-of-control car and chatting up a girl. At a certain point, it just becomes too much. Plus, he tells his new, cute friend all about his mission and employers immediately. What a terrible secret agent! Diaz's character is just as generic. She's unable to cope with the crisis she's been thrusted into and so cannot follow even the most basic survival orders like “stay put” or “run"--that is until she suddenly transforms into the ass-kicking counterpart to her hunky spy and ultimately rescues Roy. June is also a perfect sister (despite all these near-death experiences, she still makes it to her little sister's wedding) who always looks like a supermodel. Again, it's a little much.
The
writing has some small flaws, such as being one-hundred percent
predictable throughout the entire feature. When June and Roy first flirt,
he tells her a laundry list of things he wants to do “someday,” like take a train through the alps, ride a motorcycle in
Spain, and kiss a stranger on a hotel balcony. Wouldn't it be
weird if that list somehow foreshadowed everything about to happen in the film? Another problem is its dialogue. After June wakes up on an island in a red bikini and asks Roy how she got
into said skimpy clothing, he says he is trained to
dismantle bombs with only a pin and a mint, so he
can easily get a girl into a bikini without looking, “not that I'm saying
that's what I did.” Later, when June rescues Roy, she pulls the same
trick on him. Sigh.
Perhaps the most obvious incidence of bad writing is the cheap plot device Knight and Day uses to avoid more special effects and any further explanation of Miller's superhuman abilities. Roy drugs June, and the film shows her waking up briefly several times in different high risk situations--tied to the floor, on a boat, mid skydive--in a montage that would be funny if I believed the filmmakers created it to be intentionally ridiculous. That's sort of my general feeling on this adventure--were Knight and Day openly mocking its genre by taking every typical spy device and pushing it to the nth degree, the movie would have been much more enjoyable. Instead, it simply felt cliché.
Sum...ology: Fun? Yes, but easily forgettable.
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