Dawn of the Dumb
The opening fifteen minutes of James Mangold’s Knight and Day are terrific. Rogue superspy Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) uses beautiful gear-head June Havens (Cameron Diaz) to unwittingly smuggle a secret package onto a plane. The two instantly hit it off, and Julie opens up to Roy about her rushing home to be in her little sister’s wedding; Roy smiles and nods good-naturedly, while keeping an eye on the ten assassins who are also on-board.
June excuses herself to use the restroom, and Roy takes this opportunity to kill everyone on board—including the pilots. The thing that kept this from being the truly bad-ass scene Mangold wants you to think it is, is the frequent cut-aways from the knife-throwing, throat-crushing action in the aisles to June’s antics in the bathroom. She’s talking to herself in the mirror, spewing every “hope he likes me” rom-com cliché in the book, completely oblivious to the loud noises and thrashing about on the other side of the flimsy looking door.
It was here that I realized what kind of movie I was in for: another really expensive, really boring exercise in melding two imperfect genres (the romantic comedy and the action/adventure picture) that Hollywood can’t get enough of these days. In fact, screenwriter Patrick O’Neill seems hell-bent on not improving the pitfalls of both types of movies, but in magnifying them to a degree so obvious and painful that he may have single-handedly brought a style of filmmaking to an end.
Knight and Day has two major problems. The first is a frustrating lack of tone. Tone, you may recall, is that intangible confluence of dialogue, performance, and staging that tells an audience what kind of movie they’re in for.
When I saw the trailers for this movie, with Cruise shouting one-liners at Diaz from the hood of a car in the middle of a high-speed chase, I imagined the tone would be exciting and cheeky. And it kind of is, for about half the run-time; but then it becomes a fourth Jason Bourne movie—overrun with CIA showdowns, turncoats and ruthless killers. A half-hour later, we’re treated to more “comedy” when Diaz is injected with truth serum that makes her act more air-headed than usual. There’s yet another shift as Diaz herself gains the powers of a superspy. She saves Cruise’s character’s life, before engaging in the kind of playful banter that wraps Knight and Day in a big, red bow of “Aaawwwww.”
The second problem is Cameron Diaz—more specifically, the way Patrick O’Neill has written her (I do fault the actress, though, for an atrocious Boston accent that comes in an out like a faulty radio). From his screenplay, I can tell that O’Neill hates women; at the very least he understands them on the level of a sheltered eight-year-old boy. How else to explain the fact that the only forward momentum in Knight and Day involves Roy swooping in to save June from an unending series of dumb mistakes and erratic behavior?
Let me back up.
The main plot of Knight and Day involves Roy’s attempts to keep a perpetual-energy battery (disguised as a chess piece) out of the hands of his former partner in the CIA (Peter Sarsgaard), who wants to sell it to a Spanish drug lord. June’s presence on the plane complicated matters, but there’s no reason this whole story couldn’t have been resolved in eighty minutes (allowing for plenty of pretty explosions and hot cars flying through the air). Ninety minutes, tops.
But, no. This movie drags on for nearly two hours because June doesn’t know how to listen to explicit instructions, like, “Stay in this hotel room”, “Don’t run until I say ‘Go’”, and, “Don’t trust the people who have proven, again and again and again, that they want to kill you.”
I completely gave up on her when she began spilling secrets to a man she thought was Roy’s contact; Roy’s contact was described as a brilliant American nerd, just out of high school. She meets a six-foot-tall Austrian guy of about thirty-five at a bar and thinks, “Yeah, this must be they kid!”
I wanted to like this movie, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much better it would have been if the June Havens role had been written by one of the staff of 24. That show had strong women running around all over the place, which meant that the writers had to create interesting problems and even better solutions to keep the audience riveted. Not once did Jack Bauer have to helicopter his girlfriend off an exploding island because she was dumb enough to accept a cell phone call from her “best friend” while on the lam.
It’s a shame, too, because Tom Cruise almost saves the picture. This wacky take on his Ethan Hunt character from the Mission: Impossible series was funny, energetic, and warm, and I missed it when the film shifted gears and turned him into a generic action star. My eyes glazed over during the climax, as Cruise and Diaz sped through Spain on a motorcycle; him dodging a stampede of computer-generated bulls; her firing pistols and whining. I began to hate Cruise as it dawned on me that one of the most powerful men in Hollywood either didn’t care enough to veto the shitty parts of his latest vehicle or—worse yet—he didn’t know any better.
Maybe I’m the wrong guy to review this movie. The guy sitting behind me and my wife loved it; so much that he laughed hysterically at every predictable, hackneyed one-liner, and “oooh”-ed at nearly every thrown punch and car crash.
I wonder what Knight and Day 2 will be like?