The levels of ridiculousness fly sky-high in 'Knight and Day,' as do plenty of expensive cars, motorcycles and Tom Cruise. It's what we want to see in a good summer blockbuster. Don't expect it to win any awards, I don't think it was trying to anyway. It only wants a bit of your hard-earned money, and it's well worth it, as long as you weren't expecting something from the Coen brothers.
Honestly, this is a movie worth watching in theaters. The action is spectacular. I wish they had released it in 3D, because I would've gone back to see it then. Although besides that, the skill of director James Mangold ('3:10 to Yuma,' 'Walk the Line') fails to show as much as I expected. There were too many close-ups of Cruise and Diaz, and the script jumps from silly to serious to cheesy to down-right ridiculous. But then again, it's still entertaining.
What we have here is Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in roles they were born to play (maybe not so much Diaz, but definitely Cruise), and perfect timing to make them work terrificly together in this action-comedy, although I'd rather look at it as an action-thriller with a lot of charm. Cruise plays Roy Miller, who turns out to be a framed CIA agent. Haven't seen that one before. He meets Diaz's character at an airport and tries to prevent her from going on his flight, which he plans to sabotage and crash-land. Here's the point where I realized Diaz was the actual main character and not Cruise, as she boards the plane anyway, leading to an action-packed series of events that will turn her life upside down.
A lot of people won't notice it, but by viewing Diaz as the main character, the story seemed a lot like a realistic (well, less surreal) Alice in Wonderland. Yeah, sounds crazy, but trust me on this one. In this case, Diaz is Alice, Tom Cruise is the Mad Hatter, March Hare and the White Rabbit all in one, while the corrupt government is the Red Queen and the Cheshire Cat sits out on this one. I noticed the similarities when Cruise would continuously drug Diaz in order to get her to cooperate. Call me silly, but it made the film somewhat more entertaining than it already was for me.
See, since he brought her into his world by accident, when he tried to protect her and keep her out of it in the first place, he now has to protect her full-time now that she's stuck in it, because they apparently have a thing for each other. A somewhat uninteresting subplot pops up about halfway into the movie, when it is revealed that Cruise is carrying a very powerful battery that a lot of big organizations want. It's kinda cool because it's symbolic to the typical action-film immortality of Cruise's character, but besides that it still was kind of a downer after all of the opening action sequences seemed to lead up to something bigger. Another subplot appears later in the film when Diaz discovers the truth about Cruise's past-life, but it really goes nowhere with it.
You really can't take this movie too seriously. That does lose the film some credibility points, but at least it never gets too over-the-top that you start to wonder what's really going on. The ending is also a little far-fetched, but not really too bad. The movie's only purpose is to entertain, and it does it very well without ever seeming too cliché, although the only great acting performances come out of Cruise, Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard and a random appearance by Paul Dano. And as for Cruise and Diaz, I will reiterate what I said earlier that these roles were perfect for them. Cruise's character seemed to be a mix of his roles from almost all of his previous work. Name any of them, and they're here. And Diaz was starting to slip into forgetful territory, when she shines the most as that hopelessly-in-love girl that she plays brilliantly here. The interaction between the two is great, especially since we had already seen them together before in 'Vanilla Sky.'
All in all, 'Knight and Day' is full of laughs, great acting, eye-popping action and car chases that you won't forget, so if you want that, see this. As this summer doesn't have much to offer in the action-comedy category, this is probably you're best bet, although you won't be making a bad decision if you'd rather do something else time-consuming.
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