Tom Cruise gets his perfect role in Knight and Day, at least where ‘perfect’ means ‘sadly appropriate’. You know how Tom sometimes gets accused of being smug, wearing his charm like an empty carapace? Meet Roy Miller, whose charm is so superficial he can make nonchalant banter while killing people at the same time. You know how Tom’s antics often seem a little deranged? Trigger-happy Roy takes out a whole plane-load of people using fists, knives and various martial-arts moves, then shoots the pilots and (just about) lands the jumbo in a cornfield – all of which may be even more insane than shilling for Scientology or jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch.
Then again, you know how Tom Cruise has remained a star for almost three decades because he’s so unstoppable, so full of energy, always giving everything he’s got and more? Roy is like that too, flitting from Salzburg to the Azores, pursued by the CIA – who’ve labelled him a rogue agent – and international arms dealers as he tries to protect a gizmo invented by scraggly young genius Simon Feck (Paul Dano). He even finds time to fall in love – with June Havens (Cameron Diaz) – though of course we never know, and neither does June. “I don’t know what to believe,” she says, and she has a point; even mid-smooch, Roy’s eyes are darting restlessly, sizing up risk and opportunity. His smile seems a little too fixed. Or is that just Tom Cruise?
Knight and Day has one terrific joke, Roy doing James Bond while also being Tom the Charmer: “Beautiful dress, by the way,” he’ll say, while also balancing atop a speeding car and mowing down baddies – and meanwhile June looks increasingly flustered. Diaz and Cruise have a lot in common, as movie stars: both started out as popcorn icons – he a Ray Bans-wearing hotshot, she a bubbly blonde with a goofy smile – but have stretched themselves in interesting ways (Magnolia and even Tropic Thunder for him, Being John Malkovich and even My Sister’s Keeper for her) while maintaining the brand assiduously. One reason why Knight and Day is superior to the vaguely similar Killers is that Cruise and Diaz bring a lot more authority to these parts than Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl. Another is that – barring the occasional panic attack – our heroine doesn’t act like an idiot.
June slowly adapts to life with Roy (“You’ve got skills!” he enthuses), fiddles with his gun when he isn’t looking, and even drives Antonio the arms dealer to distraction by babbling on about her feelings while under the influence of his truth serum. Meanwhile Roy stalks her, leaves little notes after nearly getting her killed (“Eat a Good Breakfast”), alternates between swimming trunks and dinner jacket, and generally manages to be both charismatic and a little ‘off’ in a way that perhaps only Tom Cruise could’ve managed. Knight and Day is a throwback to old-school entertainments where an ordinary heroine gets caught up in skulduggery, and director James Mangold does sometimes find the blithe untrammelled quality of 1960s hits like Charade and Arabesque.
The only problem is that the joke gets repetitive. The sequence on the plane is uproarious, Roy offing enemy agents while June powders her nose and debates whether to go for him (she comes out of the loo, they kiss, and only when the plane starts to swerve does she notice that all the people propped up in their seats are in fact dead). The pattern then repeats itself in other locations – so much so, in fact, that Mangold does something audacious. Drugged for her own protection, June watches woozily as Roy arranges their latest escape in a kind of fragmented action montage: now they’re swinging from the ceiling, now they’re in a plane, now on a speedboat … It’s a great bit of style, but in fact it’s a mixed blessing: not only does it show up the dullness of the rest of it, it also illustrates how little sense we expect from a summer trifle like Knight and Day. The whole thing could be a fragmented montage – so it is, in a way – and it wouldn’t matter, as long as we had Tom and Cam grinning and glittering.
Bottom line? This film is fun. But it’s also forgettable. It might’ve cost an estimated $107 million (crazy money), but in terms of a review I could’ve stopped watching about 10 seconds into it, when Tom Cruise walks into a shot of an airport lounge full of thronging, scurrying humanity and the focus instantly changes from the crowds of people to the back of his head. Knight and Day is a film where real life pales in comparison to the back of Tom Cruise’s head. Talk about a perfect role.
