Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are back sharing the screen in Knight and Day, a semi-comedic James Bond/Mission Impossible hybrid with a strong whiff of cliché.
Translated into Arabic as Leqaa Motafager (An Explosive Rendezvous), the film earned a disappointing income during its first four days of screening in the US. The film, which was expected to be one of the season’s highest earners, only reached third place on the American Box Office countdown, losing the first two spots to Toy Story 3 and the Adam Sandler comedy Grown-Ups.
The first couple of minutes of Knight and Day feature the serious face of Roy Miller (Cruise) screening passengers around him at an airport. You know he is a secret agent because of his smooth ability to track all-American June Havens (Cameron Diaz) and his cool approach toward anything that comes at him, from flight attendants to Burger King employees. In a Hollywood film someone so serious must either be a secret agent, or a cold-blooded killer–the latter a character almost never played by Cruise.
Havens and Miller share an intimate conversation on the plane before Havens excuses herself to use the bathroom. While she’s gone, Miller kills all the passengers, as well as the pilot and co-pilot. Not the best of ideas when in mid-air one might think, but this is Tom Cruise after all, who the audience knows to be more than capable of single-handedly landing a plane in the middle of a corn field.
This “explosive rendezvous” between the two main characters paves the way for the usual redundant action-comedy storyline: She runs away and he gets her back; he lets her go but she decides to join the adventure anyway; someone kidnaps her and he saves the day; then someone kidnaps him and she rescues him using the skills he taught her.
Almost nine years since their first collaboration in Vanilla Sky (2001), Cruise and Cameron still have their chemistry, but different elements prevent them from turning the film into a successful project.
One is the fact that both actors took themselves too seriously while working on this film.
Compared with Get Smart, a 2008 Steve Carell summer hit that successfully traded on the same formula of integrating action and comedy, the writers and actors of Knight and Day seem to get stuck between the action angle and the comedic one. Instead of parodying the super-spy genre (as Get Smart did to hilarious effect), Knight and Day tries, but fails, to remain in the big-boys’ category.
The film borrows scenes from Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise in the hope that audiences will see it as a solid action flick, and the storyline jumps across the globe in true James-Bond style, between the US, Austria, the Portuguese Islands and Spain. The far-fetched plot ideas lend however a certain shallowness to the movie and detract from its intended purpose as a light summer comedy vehicle.
The soundtrack, enjoyable and suiting to the film’s action sequences, is one of the redeeming factors of Knight and Day, with its theme song “Someday” by the Black Eyed Peas a cool, up-beat anthem.
Director James Mangold could have done a better job. Mongold helmed the romantic classic Kate and Leopold (2001) and the horror cult Identity (2003). He also made a great, heartwarming biography out of Walk The Line (2005). Mixing the sweet touch of romantic comedy with the creepy feel of the horror genre while paying a more biographic attention to detail could be the base of an amazing film.
Unfortunately, it seems the director decided not to go for critical acclaim this time around, instead contenting himself with the hackneyed and instantly forgettable action-comedy fare that is Knight and Day.
