Knight And Day: Cruise loses the plot and so does everyone else in an atrocious action movie

Knight And Day (12A)

Verdict: Far-fetched farrago for the very easily pleased
Rating:
The miracle is that Patrick O’Neill was able to pitch his screenplay for Knight And Day and not get carted off to a home for the criminally insane.
Someone at 20th Century Fox must have known his script needed work, for no fewer than nine writers were involved on its epic, five-year journey to a screen near you.
The script they came up with is unfilmable, but director James Mangold decided to shoot it anyway. Maybe it was to put it out of its misery.

On their bike: Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise in a scene from their new film, Knight And Day

Even to try to make sense of the storyline is to risk incurable brain damage, but here goes.
We are asked to believe, first, that the CIACIACIA, in order to murder a rogue agent (played with maniacal self-confidence by Tom Cruise), would decide not to get rid of him unobtrusively, but to buy up every seat on a scheduled American internal flight and get their operatives to assassinate him in mid-air. One by one.

 

They also allow on to the flight an innocent woman whom the rogue spy bumped into at the airport. Why? Um, you got me. Because she’s played by Cameron Diaz, I guess.
Still suspending your disbelief? Well, here comes a really big test.
What do you think this woman does when the guy with the scary smile she’s just bumped into at the airport murders every other passenger in mid-air, along with the flight crew, crashes the plane into a cornfield, drugs her, breaks into her apartment,
undresses her, shoots her fireman boyfriend and carries on killing dozens more people, many of them federal government agents, before drugging her again, stripping her again and carting her off to an island in the Azores?

On-screen chemistry? Tom and Cameron in another scene from the action-packed Knight And Day

Most women I know would manage to raise more than a feeble objection, but not Ms Diaz. Would you believe she just smiles and does everything she can to help him kill a few score more government employees? No, me neither.
Incidentally, don’t ask how he smuggled her through customs while she was under general anaesthetic.
Whenever director Mangold encounters a really gaping plot-hole, he fades to black — and suddenly his leading couple have jumped to some new, equally preposterous set-piece in another glossy location.
It’s a shameless variation on the hoary old get-out clause: ‘With one bound, he was free.’
We’re even asked to believe that Cruise knows exactly when the brilliant new invention he’s carrying in his pocket will accidentally explode — which happens to be seconds after he’s handed it over to the arch-villain. Convenient, or what?
OK, I know Knight And Day is meant to be escapism.
And I would have been willing to go along with this as harmless fun if the dialogue had been witty or the whole thing had been played as a spoof of idiotic action movies; but most of the cast behave as if it’s The Bourne Identity.
It’s a terrible waste of proper actors who are paid to find the reality in characters.

And Peter Sarsgaard (so impressive in An Education) obviously thought so, too, because the actor, who’s signposted early on as the villain and then — unsurprisingly — turns out to be precisely that, intones every one of his lines in a monotone,
as though it’s being fed to him via an earpiece.
There hasn’t been a performance this openly scornful of Hollywood since Edward Norton’s in the remake of The Italian Job.
All I can say about Cruise is that he seems to have lost what’s left of his mind. He emanates a terrifying vacuity, and thinks that flashing his teeth a lot is the same thing as charm and sex appeal.
Maybe this will persuade some people, but Gordon Brown made the same assumption during the last general election, and look what happened to him.

Outtake

The recession is starting to bite. Tom Cruise cut his advance for Knight And Day from $20 million to
$11 million

Diaz, whose career choices are looking increasingly desperate, struggles — and who wouldn’t? — to make a seamless transition from being frazzled and panic-stricken one moment to an ice-cool assassin the next, and ends up looking like a demented duck.
I imagine some people will enjoy Knight And Day. For them, it will be enough that Cruise and Diaz look good for their age and travel to exotic places.
For them, it will be worth the high price of admission to see a couple of movie stars survive high-speed chases, several thousand poorly-aimed bullets and a load of computer-generated bullocks.
That’s not a misprint. Cruise and Diaz actually become involved in the Pamplona bull run, which the filmmakers try to convince us takes place in Seville.
Not many blockbusters have been mounted with quite such brazen contempt for the public.
The last one I can remember was the near-identical Killers, in which Ashton Kutcher grinned cheesily as the international super-spy, and Katherine Heigl got to play the blonde homebody who turned ruthless assassin.
Yet I wouldn’t deny that you may have an incredulous grin on your face, at least for the first few minutes, if you’re willing to sit there passively and let Knight And Day wash over you.
I’m just pointing out that it could and should have been a whole lot better, and would have been if anyone involved had given a damn about quality.
Toy Story 3D was a timely reminder that summer blockbusters can be made with care, love and intelligence.
Even lightweight entertainment doesn’t have to be this atrocious.