Film Review: Knight and Day (2 stars)
Mid-way through this almost impossibly action-packed movie, it occurred to me that watching Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz shoot, strangle and dismember their way through some of the most beautiful scenery on Earth felt strangely like watching cats.
Bear with me. You ever stop to watch a cluster of kittens in a store window? They’re adorably random things, haphazardly chasing their own and others’tails, pouncing on invisible objects or stopping suddenly to groom. Sometimes they even fall asleep unexpectedly.About the only thing you can be sure of is that they won’t up and start driving fast cars or shooting people.
Well, Cruise and Diaz are just like two of those adorable, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-them kittens, except you know the only thing they will do is drive fast cars and shoot people. Cruise does most of the work, though Diaz, like fellow LBA (leggy blond actress) Katherine Heigl in the recent Killers, gets in a few well-placed shots.
The film revolves around a newly invented battery that can power a small city, a large submarine or a mid-sized Scientology convention. It’s about the size of a double-A. It’s called the zephyr, a word whose two real-life definitions are a) a thin cotton material, which describes most of Diaz’s wardrobe; or b) the lightest of breezes, which sums up the film’s dramatic impact.
Since the battery is never actually used to power anything, not even Cruise’s trailer, its entire purpose is to give the characters a small round object to chase. A ball of yarn would have done just as well.
Cruise, whose character is unobtrusively named Roy Miller, first bumps into Diaz (as June Havens) in an airport in Wichita, which was one of the film’s working titles. After he arranges for her to be on the same mostly empty plane as he is, it’s revealed that he’s Trouble, Man (another working title). There’s a mid-air shootout followed by a fiery crash landing.
I should save time here by mentioning that the film also includes (in no particular order) a rooftop chase, a fight in a kitchen, a tropical island, a freeway shootout, a gunfight in a warehouse, a plunge into a river, a passing parade, a fight on a train, a motorcycle chase and a running battle through the narrow streets of a European city. It’s as though screenwriter Patrick O’Neill just borrowed and glued together bits and pieces from every other action movie in history. He then must have paused and thought: “Hmm, should I include the running of the bulls in Seville; an Austrian location to let someone say, ‘vere ist zee battery?’ before getting smacked with a bratwurst; or a plot? I’ve only got room for two.” Guess which ones he picked.
The co-stars have a certain onscreen chemistry, but most of it CHCl3, also known as chloroform. Every time O’Neill’s script backs the characters into a corner, Cruise slips Diaz some knockout drops. She wakes up in an entirely different scene, momentarily out of danger. Remember how kittens can fall asleep without warning? Same concept, except there’s something creepy about Cruise constantly drugging his love interest.
Besides, they’re both more slightly interesting when awake. Miller is introduced as a CIA agent who may gone off the deep end, thus giving him a license to order pie à la mode in the midst of a hostage taking, and to natter on like a manic-depressive at the top of his swing. He also does a funny bit about June’s survival chances “with me, without me,” holding his hand high and then dropping it down -- though mostly that just made me remember that she’s two inches taller than him.
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