Knight and Day
My rating:




There are films based on ideas so fresh, so innovative, so compelling, that they practically demand to be made. A director or screenwriter may have thought of it, mulled it over in his mind, found himself getting more and more excited about it until he's practically rushing to his PC, or even pen and paper, to get it down before another stray thought evicts it from his mind, never to return. And a good many years later, it may finally see the light of day as a theatrically-released motion picture that makes audiences go "OMG that was such a great movie, and it was based on so simple but so fantastic an idea, how could it have taken Hollywood this long to make it?" Knight and Day is not one of those films.

But for what it is, it's pretty damn good.

June Havens (Cameron Diaz) bumps into handsome stranger Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) at the airport, and when they end up sharing a plane, an attraction instantly develops. Then she steps out of the bathroom to find that Roy has killed every other passenger - including the pilots - and is maneuvering the plane into a controlled crash landing. It turns out that Roy is a rogue CIA agent on the run from his own people, and has in his possession a super-battery called the Zephyr that he claims his partner Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) is planning to sell to arms dealer Antonio Quintana (Jordi Mollà). Thus begins June's whirlwind adventure at Roy's side as he takes her around the world, picking up Simon Feck (Paul Dano), the teenage inventor of the Zephyr along the way, as her feelings for Roy swing wildly between infatuation, fear, and mistrust.

Imagine some Big Shot Hollywood Producer came up to you and said, "Okay, we got Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz available to make a movie together, and you gotta write the script. It's gotta be a comedy 'cos Cameron's good at that, it's gotta be an action movie 'cos Tom's good at that, and it's gotta be a romance 'cos, duh, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Get to it." This movie is probably the best possible thing you could've come up with under such less-than-artistically-ideal conditions, which is a minor miracle considering the even worse conditions under which it was actually made. Of the odd dozen writers who worked on it, the lion's share of credit probably goes to writer-director James Mangold, a journeyman director who has always done perfectly competent work.

Here, he shows a remarkable talent for taking a dull and generic premise and fleshing it out with a dozen little grace notes that make it a surprisingly well-written film. June is an unexpectedly well-developed character, for one. She restores classic cars for a living, but this tomboyish profession isn't the be-all and end-all of her character; it gives her depth, it makes her believably tough and brave when necessary, but she can also be as ditzy as the needs of comedy demands. The dynamics of June's and Roy's relationship are also interesting. No matter how much she freaks out or does foolish and foolhardy things, he is never anything but respectful, reassuring, even empowering. You believe her when she says "he makes me feel strong." (Ladies: this is what you should expect from your man.) Even plotwise, it's more conscientious than you'd expect in making sure its typically far-fetched action-movie plot hangs together; there's a bit where a Beach Boys song is used just to take extra care in linking two plot points together.

Cruise and Diaz are two of the most charismatic movie stars of our time, and at first I wondered why they'd never done a movie together - until, of course, I remembered 2001's Vanilla Sky. But Diaz played Cruise's psycho ex-girlfriend in that one, so here's where we get a proper romance between the two. Diaz is delightful (and yes, I may be biased in that I am a heterosexual male, but what the hey). As mentioned, her character is developed well enough that she can vacillate between ditzy and smart and be believable at both - although it is when she is the former that the film gets most of its laughs. Cruise is of course an old hand at playing action hero, and his unflappably charming Roy is a neat variation of the ones he's done before, but he's not so successful at generating heat with his co-star; whatever chemistry the two have together is largely due to Diaz.

I actually considered giving this movie four stars. I can't think of anything it did wrong, other than perhaps it could've played up the laughs more; Mangold is great with action and thrills, not so much with comedy. And there's a late-stage chase scene in the midst of a bull run that features some very obvious CGI bulls and green-screen work. But ultimately, what keeps it from greatness - or at least the greatness that a four-star rating from TMBF bestows - is that it's just a very well-executed example of a very unremarkable story; I doubt I'll remember much about it in a couple months' time. Still, it's a more than worthwhile way to spend your RM10++ (depending on venue, cinema chain, day of the week, and a bunch of other factors that us moviegoers really ought to be privy to).

NEXT REVIEW: Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame
Expectations: my cinematic horizons broadened