Release: 15th of July

Length: 109 minutes

Rating: M (Action Violence, infrequent language and drug references)

I was raised with the understanding that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. With that in mind, let me just say that the Roy Miller who is the main character of Knight and Day and is played by Tom Cruise is a much more engaging figure than the Roy Miller played by Matt Damon in Green Zone. I guess Paul Dano is pretty good as well, and the film itself features the best usage of Hall & Oates in cinema since Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer. Oh, and John Powell’s score is really really good. Yeah.

I actually have no idea why I just did that. You might have thought that in saying everything nice I had to say about Knight and Day, I would have earned the right to basically trash the damn film. But come to think of it, I really did have nothing to say at all. Knight and Day is a film so nondescript, so bland and unmemorable, that it’s particularly difficult to really tear it apart, because there’s nothing there to be torn apart. So I guess it’s not a particularly atrocious film. It’s just not really… anything… at all.

The “film” follows June Havens, a ditzy blonde played by ditzy blonde Cameron Diaz, so the casting department was really on the ball. She’s a rather sweet-natured girl who gets accidentally deliberately wrapped up in this grand conspiracy augmented by the villainous Fitzgerald, who is played by Peter Sarsgaard, more widely known as the mini-Malkovich. And by “more widely,” I mean “only in this review.” Fitzgerald apparently used to be partners with this Roy Miller dude, who is a stark raving lunatic, and so therefore he is played by Tom Cruise. I don’t know about you, but when I see a pair of spies, and one of them is Tom Cruise, and one of them is Peter Sarsgaard, I’m not going to have a difficult time finding out which one is the bad guy.

Nevertheless, the film plays along, with June not being sure whether Roy is the true villain, or Fitzgerald. So while we’re shouting at the screen that she’s a complete idiot, she gets dragged through all sorts of wacky and high-octane adventures, including a car chase and some sort of mad dash across a beach and a motorcycle chase and a gunfight and another gunfight as well. And also a fistfight. Some of these, namely the first car chase, are actually fairly well done action sequences, and they move with briskness and even wit. But the vast majority of it is just laborious sturm und drang that we’ve seen dozens of times before. It’s not lazy, it’s just really tired – when you’re nodding off during some sort of crazy motorcycle chase in Spain, you know you’re in trouble.

I suppose plot-wise, this film resembles Charade, where an innocent women is caught between two feuding spies, and isn’t sure which one she can trust. There’s also a MacGuffin. The thing is, Stanley Donen’s 1963 film is well focused, laced with charm, strong performances, and a script by Peter Stone that is so sharp you could… pick your teeth with it. Knight and Day, on the other hand, is so messy on a script level that it’s a miracle it even got off the page (the film was actually in development hell, and probably should have stayed there, truth be told). James Mangold, who helmed the film, is actually a very competent and talented filmmaker, with Cop Land and Walk the Line being quite accomplished works, and even something like Identity, which has a few casting issues and is a bit clumsy on a writing level, could be considered an “interesting” film. But Knight and Day has nothing of that. Visually, it’s competent, but there are no ideas being brought to the table. It’s just processed Hollywood junk, and I wouldn’t mind if it were actually fun. But it isn’t. Tom Cruise has got an unhinged angle to him, and he really seems to care about his role and the film in general, but no one else does at all.

So I guess I did have something to say, in the long run. The “summer” period of American fare is supposed to supply us with a lot of really fun blockbusters that we can all enjoy despite being fairly empty-headed. Knight and Day succeeds at being empty-headed, but fails utterly at being fun. It’s a shame given the talent involved, but there’s absolutely no way that this can be recommended. I could recommend seeing a worse film, merely for a laugh, but Knight and Day is just celluloid mediocrity, and sometimes that’s the far greater sin.  

Pass