Bland bland bland
KNIGHT AND DAY Cert. 12A
Knight and Day is a film that is exactly the sum of its parts.
A spy comedy, with Tom Cruise as relaxed as can be running around as his bread and butter action hero persona, dragging along a ditsy, past-her-best Cameron Diaz. Cruise is Roy Miller, a secret agent who finds his own agency working against him, and Diaz is simply a glamourous civilian thrown in to widen the film’s appeal.
It’s numbingly bland, and even makes cliches out of cliches. Although many might kindly dismiss it as harmless summer entertainment, elements of secular worldviews are shamelessly displayed to further embed themselves into viewers’ minds. Countless government agents are killed without conscience, and the love story that damply half-sparks between Cruise’s and Diaz’s characters is based solely on ‘fun’. One character appears to trim and regrow his moustache miraculously between shots!
The James Bond-esque selection of locations helps to raise the picture’s enjoyability, and much of the action is executed thrillingly, the highlight being a motorbike and car chase interrupted by a bull-running event in Spain. Disappointingly though, this is one of the better films released over the summer, and to prove to the studios that the public doesn’t just want to see tried and tested formula with nothing new to speak of, Knight and Day was close to flopping at the box office.
The sole motive for the existence of films like this is to make money, as well perhaps as to reassure Tom Cruise that he’s still got it. Many may watch to relax their brains after a hard day at the office, which is fair enough, but not when the film induces drowsiness due to its lack of fresh ideas and creativity!
