Knight and Day User Reviews

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 For the last few years Tom Cruise has been labeled as a crazy, ego mad, ripe for the silly suit, madman. With his career in danger of being ripped out from under him Cruise has been going for the comedy to get people to like him. First it was Les Grossman and now it is Knight & Day and the later is not helping him. The film comes across as a commercial showing how versatile Cruise is. Hey look everyone he’s funny, oh and look now he is being a badass spy. I’m not saying the film is bad but its horribly generic and at no point care’s what you think of the plot.

 That is Diaz's face through the whole film

The film is told through the eyes of Cameron Diaz’s character June Havens. The script tries so hard to make her the every man/woman that in the end the character doesn’t make any sense. The film asks us to buy that she likes cars because her father does and yet tries to make the joke that she has a decent fashion sense and doesn’t know how to carry a gun. Several times in the film Cruise’s character Roy hands her a gun and she holds it like a two year old with a pacifier. Throughout the film she does get progressively better but having that joke juxtapose with her screaming and panicky in a tense situation like underappreciated women in bad action does not work. Of course the film is peppered with her spitting out nonsense about car parts and types of classic hot rods that clearly Diaz doesn’t believe a word of.

 Nothing is going on between those ears

That leaves Cruise who seems to be trying to do the best impersonation of himself of when the public openly embraced him as a cool guy. Aside from one action scene Roy doesn’t really do anything but run away from everyone or chase someone for a couple of minutes. The film seems to be trying to connect with the Mission Impossible persona of Cruise but it feels like a poor copy. At no point in time does he seem to actually have things in control. Naturally this is part of the subplot of whether or not his character is actually crazy, however at no point in time does his character actually act crazy nor does he try to have a serious conversation. Just like Diaz’s character Knight is written with such a scattershot of personalities that the audience has nothing to latch onto. Even if we were suppose to think he is entirely crazy and then switch it at the end would have been better than this non-commitence of screenwriting.

 "Look I'm holding TWO guns. I'm cool!"

That’s the biggest problem with this film. It’s so generic that you can’t even call it bad. The film sure as hell doesn’t try to make you care about the larger picture, so much so that the battery that plays as the McGuffin should have been called McGuffin just to get it out of the way. And some of the massive plot holes in this film would make a piece of swiss cheese jealous. Besides a single action scene most of the action can be tossed off and the characters are desperately shoved so far down my throat that I asked my friend for the Hiemlich.

So is there anything good in the film I ask myself? Well the pacing works. The structure of the film is predictable and the end…no I’m not going go there, it hurts so much I wanted to dig out my brain with a rusty Swiss army knife I found at the dump. I digress. The pacing moves the film along so I can almost honestly say I wasn’t bored. It tried to move fast enough that I wouldn’t care about everything else in the film however when the third act hits the glaring problems of this film stepped right in front of the firing squad.

 Generic romantic tension given to us by Twilight

Before I started writing this I had it in mind that this film was two stars but now that I come to the end of my ranting this film is a one star. The general public may possibly eat this film up and I understand why, but as a film goer this level of generic bio-waste is inexcusable. I went in hoping for a descent action film and left with the knowledge that the public gets what it asks for generic pie with a side of generic.