Film Review: Knight and Day (2010)
James Mangold's Knight and Day is a curious artefact from that awkward transitional period in Hollywood when the traditional star vehicle began showing its age. What might once have been considered a sure-fire recipe for success—pairing two of Tinseltown's most bankable names, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, in a globe-trotting action-comedy—instead exposes the diminishing returns of relying on marquee value alone.
The premise is straightforward enough: Diaz's June Havens, a somewhat lonely woman recovering from a failed relationship, finds herself seated next to Cruise's Roy Miller, a charming rogue who may or may not be a rogue CIA agent, aboard a flight to Boston. Before the seatbelt sign has switched off, bullets are flying, bodies are dropping, and June is unwittingly thrust into a world of international espionage involving a mysterious MacGuffin—a perpetual energy battery coveted by various shadowy figures.
Where Knight and Day stumbles, and stumbles badly, is in its execution. Patrick O'Neill's screenplay is utterly uninspired, content to coast on genre clichés rather than carve out any distinctive identity of its own. The action sequences, rather than thrilling, are shovelled together with a careless hand; the CGI-heavy set pieces lack the physical weight and spatial coherence that might render them genuinely spectacular, instead coming across as unconvincing and bordering on the farcical. When a film's most elaborate sequences feel weightless, one begins to question the point of staging them at all.
More damaging still is the complete absence of chemistry between the two leads. Cruise and Diaz, both capable performers in their own right, fail to spark any genuine romantic tension. The "romance" of the piece—such as it is—feels thoroughly compromised by this disconnect. One struggles to believe in their attraction, let alone root for their survival as a couple. The humour, too, is largely absent; for a film marketed as a romantic action-comedy, it delivers precious few genuine laughs.
Mangold, a usually reliable director whose credits include the far superior Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, manages to make the proceedings somewhat watchable—but only just. He cannot, however, elevate the material beyond its fundamental mediocrity. The film fails to meet even the modest standards of "mindless summer entertainment," that backhanded compliment reserved for pictures that ask nothing of their audience yet still manage to deliver a modicum of pleasure.
In an earlier era, the combined wattage of Cruise and Diaz might have been sufficient to paper over such deficiencies. In 2010, however, their presence reads less as a guarantee of quality and more as a desperate attempt to compensate for fatal flaws inherent in the production. Knight and Day shows that star power alone cannot salvage a film when the script is threadbare, the action is artificial, and the central relationship generates all the heat of a damp squib.
Rating: 3/10
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