Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
7/4/10
You
know how you know a movie star? The person in question doesn't just
have talent: they have an appeal that is totally unique, and that
rubs people the wrong way in almost (but not quite) equal numbers to the
ones it entertains. Yes, folks, Tom Cruise is an honest-to-goodness
movie star, with his live wire intensity and million-watt charisma that
seem to come from a place both dark and untrustworthy. It's said
that Christian Bale based his American Psycho performance on Cruise's
icy likability, and many a director has found the contradiction between
his brilliant smile and underlying emptiness to be just the spark their
story needed. While he's most famous for the empty calorie Mission:
Impossible movies and a run of truly terrible 80's Simpson/Bruckheimer
flicks, Cruise has earned his 3 Oscar nominations and remains one of our
most interesting actors. But, of course, that sinister undercurrent
to his appeal made him especially vulnerable to an ever-stranger series
of revelations about his personal life, and a romance with Katie Holmes
that seemed like the plot of a conspiracy thriller helped to put his career
on the defensive. It's remained there for several years, despite
the popular WWII thriller Valkyrie and a winning
supporting turn in Tropic Thunder, and
the new action comedy Knight and Day is a studied, deliberate attempt
to thread the needle between Leading Man Cruise and Crazy Man Cruise to
crowd-pleasing effect. The tragedy is that for a while, it does so
brilliantly, before an army of uncredited script doctors make the final
act ever-more implausible and uninvolving. When Knight and Day
is rolling, it's a delight. But the diminishing returns of its final
reels make it unlikely to be the movie that inspires America to reopen
its heart to Jerry Maguire.
Mechanic
June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is boarding a flight home to the wedding of
her sister April (Maggie Grace) with rare car parts in tow in hopes of
restoring her late father's vintage GTO as a wedding present. She
twice bumps into handsome, charming Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), and finally
ends up in front of him in a boarding line where she's told there's no
room for her on the nearly empty plane. Roy is being watched on security
cameras by Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard), who manipulates the airline computers
to let June onto the plane. Roy is surprised, and flirts with her
for a while before having to get down to business: everyone else
on the plane, even the pilots, is an enemy agent trying to kill him.
After getting them first, he crash-lands the plane in a corn field and
drugs June, advising her not to get into cars with anyone who repeatedly
uses words like “safe” and “secure”. She wakes up at home and tries
to go about her day, but before you know it, Fitzgerald and his goons have
her in custody and Roy is hanging from vehicles and flying through the
air to rescue her. June runs from both parties and seeks out the
help of her firefighter ex Rodney (Marc Blucas). But Roy just turns
up again, shoots Rodney (just a flesh wound, folks), and kidnaps her onto
his mission, finding and protecting scientist Simon Feck (Paul Dano), who's
invented a tiny battery powerful enough to run “a small city, or a large
sub”. With Fitzgerald and company in pursuit, June has to decide
just how much she can trust Roy. And if she does trust him, is there
any way she can ever return to her old life?
Like
Ross Perot's plans, there are drafts of Knight and Day's screenplay
lying all over Hollywood. Scott Frank, Dana Fox, Laeta Kalogridis,
Ted & Nicholas Griffin, Timothy Dowling, Simon Kinberg and director
James Mangold are all believed to have taken turns at a script that remains
credited only to its original writer, Patrick O'Neill. And it shows,
and not just in what might be the worst title of the last ten years (seriously:
watch the movie and then try to tell me what the hell “Knight and Day”
has to do with anything). Plot points like April's wedding and June's
relationship with Rodney get pushed hard early, only to be dispensed with
in a dreary montage around the 2/3 mark. And Roy's insanity isn't
only never explained, it becomes less and less pronounced until an awkward
tacked-on ending that finds the man as sane as you and me while practically
the entire second act is read back to us in a desperate strain for payoff.
What
makes the movie's schizophrenia all the more unfortunate is that it's still
fun, and for about the first hour has all it needs to be a really crackerjack
action comedy. Roy really is a perfect fit for Cruise, allowing him
to play his utter confidence and relentless charm as madness, while Diaz's
sexy tomboy appeal makes her seem competent enough to keep surviving the
chaos, but enough of an ordinary person to be horrified by it. And
Mangold does a brilliant job framing the action sequences from her perspective,
so June's just running for her life while it seems to rain cars and airplanes
and random explosions, and Roy just keeps violating the laws of physics
all around her. These are really exciting scenes, and extremely funny
for fans of the kind of summer movie mayhem Knight and Day is riffing
on. A climactic race through the streets of Italy is a bit lax effects-wise,
but the logistics of it are extremely clever.
Knight
and Day's troubles start in two places. One, however attractive
and charming Cruise and Diaz are, their characters don't strike much in
the way of romantic sparks both because Roy's totally bonkers and also
because we learn next to nothing about him until the closing scenes (coughRESHOOTScough).
And despite this fact, the script feels the need to go down the most heavily-traveled
romantic comedy roads. Perhaps it's because the romcom stuff fits
so badly here, or maybe it's just the collective bad judgment of the many
who worked on the project, but motivation is almost entirely missing from
everything June does from the 2/3 mark on. On the one hand, the movie
is desperate to make her an actualized action hero who can be Roy's equal,
but on the other, she keeps making decisions that only have to do with
her either needing this man or wanting to push him away. The way
the two characters are reunited after the inevitable third act turn breakup
is beyond shoddy, and that previously-referenced ending... well, it's not
good.
Mangold
is an elite actor's director, and the quality of the performances in his
movies (Copland, Kate & Leopold and Identity,
to name a few) tend to be better than their scripts. But many of
Knight and Day's supporting roles are miscast, led by Sarsgaard
and Davis, who've been playing way too many heavies lately. Both
actors tend to smolder rather than burn, and so villains don't really play
to their strengths. Really, the stars aside, the only performer on
hand who isn't a bit less than you'd hope for is Grace, who can play the
ingrate sister in her sleep but seems to be a forgotten relic of earlier
drafts.
All
of this will add up for most viewers to the sensation of “OK”. Knight
and Day mixes the great, the banal and the painfully misguided in just
about the right ratio to produce adequate entertainment. But when
it's rolling, you can really see what a great comeback star vehicle it
should have made for Tom Cruise, who could really use one. |
