Review: Knight and Day

So this movie has been out for almost two weeks now, but I finally saw it yesterday on a spur of the moment thing. My mom came in the door and was like "let's go see a movie!". Naturally, with my vast knowledge of movies and which ones are out at the moment and would be appropriate for my mother, I narrowed it down to this one and Toy Story 3. Even though I'm aware there's other PG and PG-13 movies out there (like Karate Kid and A-Team) I wasn't interested in those, and since my little brother and I had already seen Toy Story 3, I suggested Knight and Day, the new spy/action movie starrgin Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. In the end, it's the type of movie you see if you're in the exact situation I found myself in: a spur of the moment movie trip where you don't care too much about what you see. And with that in mind, it ended up being fun enough, but it sure wasn't perfect.

Here we have this guy Roy Miller (Cruise) wandering through the airport, acting casual (but we know he's not because he's Tom Cruise), and he spies June Havens (Diaz) lugging he heavy suitcase around. Naturally, she manages to run into him.Then she does it again. Finally, they're at the same gate and June is rejected because the flight is apparently "booked". Quick flash to Agent Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) following Roy's progress at the airport from security cameras and they see him make contact with June twice. They then decide she may be involved with whatever it he's doing and get her on the plane with him. And now the action starts, and it really doesn't let up through the entire movie. So if you're looking for action, it's a good bet you'll have fun. But for how long before you start to question other things?

It really comes down to the conflict of the movie not being threatening or exciting enough to make you care a whole lot. You know neither Roy or June will die because the tone is set as lighthearted and fun from the beginning so there's nothing to worry about there. There's no real threatening bad guy to deal with which only adds to the lack of life or death scenarios. And all in all, the action/chase scenes isn't anything new, but that's to be expected now. I rarely find a movie nowadays where the action is something totally out of this world. It's all be done before.

Thankfully, the most redeeming factor of this movie is Tom Cruise himself. I'm well aware that he's not the most popular person with many people since he's generally insane and usually plays the same character in every movie. However, I found this more lighthearted, action side of him to be entertaining enough. The movie tries to make you laugh, and many people may find it mildly funny and chuckle a few times, but it really doesn't succeed too well (although it does take a lot more for me to laugh in a movie). In the case of Diaz, she was always riding the line between being tolerable and annoying. I thought her and Cruise worked alright together with Cruise doing all the work to keep it alive, but her frantic bumblings and screaming just kind of got old. I just wanted to see Cruise own more bad guys instead of her freaking out all the time.

But in the end, I was mildly entertained by the action and seeing Cruise in action again, but the plot and its conflict was pretty weak and tried to rely too much on the comedy side of it which didn't quite work. I was also disappointed to find that James Mangold, the director of Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma had done this. I would expect a bit more from a director with great movies like these. Oh well, hopefully audiences haven't completely given up on Cruise yet because I think he's still got a lot of action and entertainment left.