All his own stunts, all his own abs and all his own teeth: Tom Cruise revs up the bike for what could be his final and slightly distracted outing as an action lead – before possibly settling into a new career phase pursuing the character/comedy roles in which he has been winning hearts and minds.
This is a sub-North-By-Northwest caper, directed by James Mangold, in which Cruise plays Roy Miller, a mysterious guy on a plane who charms the bejeepers out of single gal June, played by Cameron Diaz, who’s sitting right by him. But it isn’t long before the plane comes under terrifying attack; someone’s out to get Roy and hapless June has no choice to go along with him in a series of crash-bang adventures with exploding cars, flying bullets and annoying smirks.
Miller turns out to be a rogue government agent who’s got his hands on a super-secret invention: an everlasting battery the size of a normal battery, which has all sorts of military implications. It’s no spoiler to say that he keeps the battery hidden in a toy knight, and his real name is Knight, but this doesn’t entirely explain the film’s title, as June’s surname is supposed to be Havens. It might as well be Whitfield, for all the sense this is going to make.
At any rate, Miller’s superiors think that he intends to sell the battery to enemy powers, but twinkly-eyed, diminutive-yet-muscular Miller insists he is actually protecting this gizmo – a classic Hitchcockian "MacGuffin"– from treacherous elements among those very superiors who want to make a few dollars by making it available to the bad guys. Viola Davis plays the agency boss; Peter Sarsgaard is Agent Fitzgerald and Paul Dano plays Simon Feck, the scientific genius who invented the battery, and who has to be protected in a MacGuffiny way himself.
Having crashlanded the plane in a cornfield with a certain type of sang-froid equidistantly poised between Cary Grant and Leslie Nielsen, Roy takes June on a wacky thrill-ride of evasive action. Cruise appears to want to differentiate this role from his action hero Ethan Hunt in the megabuck Mission: Impossible movies by making him that bit edgier, a bit more dangerous, a bit more off-the-wall, by giving him a little more of a gleam in the eye, and perhaps to keep alive the possibility that he is what his duplicitous dead-eyed handlers say that he is: a traitor.
Or perhaps all these things are just coming naturally to Cruise. Either way, he certainly carries off the role with gusto and humour in the film’s initial phases, clinging cheerfully on to the top of speeding SUVs and shooting merrily away at his pursuers – and in a world of CGI fakery, Cruise’s old-school athleticism is a thing of wonder.
There is a nice scene in which bewildered, scared June goes out for a cup of coffee with her stolid, likable ex-boyfriend Rodney (Marc Blucas) and confides in him the terrifying situation she’s in. In the middle of this, Miller appears: tensely charming, more than a little creepy, intent on urging June to come away with him, because he is the only one who can protect her against the heavily armed bad guys who are about to show up – but not before he has established a little alpha-male bonding with Rodney, who is a fireman. The scene ends with an uproarious shoot-out, with some well-turned quips, and the whole thing showcases Cruise’s distinctive acting style: pumped up, physical, macho, but with a odd though not unsuccessful need for comedy – and wholly unreal in every particular.
Diaz, like Cruise, appears semi-unclothed in order to demonstrate that she’s still got it, but there is something curious in her character’s screen relationship with Cruise. By simply drugging her, Miller is able to take his unwilling companion to all sorts of difficult and dangerous hotspots in Europe, and they even find themselves on a Hitchcockian train ride. Diaz looks plausibly freaked out at all times as Cruise manhandles her around, and her expression of panicky good-humoured amazement had me wondering if there wasn’t the tiniest hint of real life in this discomposure.
But they are always relaxed, and if there is no "chemistry" in the Cruise-Diaz partnership then there is nothing too awful either. After a feisty start, the movie begins to run very low on gas, and it demonstrates, inadvertently, that an action caper like this really does need high-quality gags, and real human interest between the leads, if it is going to hold its own, and Knight and Day is light on both. It’s not bad DVD entertainment, but as a big summer movie, it’s a bit of a washout.
