About.com Rating

Vanilla Sky co-stars Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz reunite for Knight and Day, an action-packed romp that starts strong, stalls in the middle, and then slowly drags its way across the finish line. Cruise and Diaz have real chemistry, and some of the action stunts are brilliantly choreographed, but after a kooky set-up and first half, first time feature film writer Patrick O'Neill seems to have run out of story.

What started as something not original but at least entertaining enough to make you want to go along for the ride, winds up as just another generic big-name action film minus any real heart or soul.

Knight and Day has plane crashes, motorcycle chases, wild car rides through city streets and all over freeways, which is all fine and dandy. Director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line) and the stunt teams worked hard to pull these off, but it appears not as much effort was put into the non-action parts of Knight and Day. It seems all that action is there, in part, to disguise a sketchy plot and cardboard cut-out characters.

Knight and Day - The Story

Roy Miller (Cruise) twice bumps into June Havens (Diaz) in the Wichita airport, but the two incidents appear random to June so she shakes them off. And then when she's trying to check in at the gate for her flight, Roy's right behind her in line. The airline rep says she's not actually on that flight, and Ray says sometimes these things happen for a reason.

That's three random encounters in less than 10 minutes, yet June's still not catching on that there's something fishy about this handsome stranger who keeps showing up.
When a seat opens up on the plane, June happily boards the flight - a flight Roy's on, of course. When she gets on the plane, she notices there are only four or five other passengers. And still June's totally oblivious. She jokes about the fact there's only a couple of people on the supposedly full flight but takes her seat and orders a drink. At this point, I've given up on June as a real person and decided she's writer O'Neill's version of a blonde joke.

The tone O'Neill and Mangold establish with that set-up signals the film's taking place in make-believe world, so anything that follows doesn't have to make much sense or follow any logical pattern. The next hour and a half is a slam-bang roller coaster ride where June is drugged and taken all over the world - sometimes against her will, sometimes with her full consent - while Roy continuously insists he's one of the good guys trying to keep a top-secret, groundbreaking invention out of the hands of those who'd use its power for evil. And during some of her more lucid periods, June adds two and two together and comes up with five - while the audience knows exactly what's going on from the first minute of the film and can only wait for her to catch up.

Knight and Day - The Bottom Line

Knight's explained, but Day's left dangling. Is it because June shines a little light on Roy's covert activities? Is it because she becomes the sun his life is revolving around? Or is it just because Knight and Day sounded better than Knight and Havens? Who knows? Writer O'Neill and director Mangold can't drug the audience to make us believe we've been given the answer, but that is the device they use to get over bumpy spots - or to avoid writing more dialogue. It's a disturbing trick in that this stranger is continuously drugging this woman and putting her life in danger during those periods she's completely out of it, and at one point she actually looks forward to it which is even more disturbing. Yes, this is a comedy taking place in a world in which Tom Cruise's character is more deadly than Bond, more skilled at escape than Bourne, and more creative than MacGyver, but I'm still left a little creeped out by the whole drugging plot devise.
At the beginning of this review I mentioned Cruise and Diaz have chemistry, yet Mangold doesn't really let the film venture into the romance zone often enough. The sexual tension never passes a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10 and the opportunity's lost to take the focus off of the nonsensical plot by throwing in a little PG-13 rated love story.

As well as Diaz and Cruise work in the lead roles, and as charming as they are in character, Knight and Day just doesn't quite come together. It's an okay movie that could have been something special but never lives up to its opening set-up potential.

GRADE: C

Knight and Day was directed by Jame Mangold and is rated PG-13 for sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language.

Theatrical Release: June 23, 2010