Knight and Day

Like a train careening off the rails, the new Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight and Day rides the dangerous space between the track and oblivion. It's constantly on the verge of finding focus, but every step forward starts feeling like a step back. It makes a mistake, shrugs it off, does something mildly interesting, and then makes the same mistake again. It excites, then frustrates. It powers ahead, then sputters to a halt. It's a veritable lesson in contradictory moviemaking, an oddly hypocritical assault on our emotions.

Knight and Day travels a road paved with good intentions, but ultimately slips on the pavement, smashes into a tree, and casually attempts to escape the impending explosion. With director James Mangold at the helm, the movie ends up a mangled mess, barely emerging from the wreckage with critical injuries and a lot of wayward ambition. It is steadfast in its dedication to pushing every element over the top, but it never knows how to effectively strike a balance between the believable and the fantastic.

It probably sounded like a decent idea on paper. Tom Cruise flashes his trademark grin in a silly, lighthearted role that essentially spoofs his Ethan Hunt character from the Mission: Impossible franchise. To counter the goofy testosterone, Cameron Diaz flashes her trademark smile to play a standard damsel-in-distress role that attempts to counter the clichéd image of a helpless girl by lending her a manly car obsession. Okay, so maybe it didn't sound better on paper.

But Cruise's charisma and Diaz's charm has to count for something and the two actors do light up the screen, even if their talents lie apart and not together. It would seem that some aspect of Knight and Day is intended to be romantic, but there's no love story to root for here, because Cruise and Diaz have all the chemistry of two frozen fish sticks. They spout their lines and strut around each other as though they're searching for that perfect moment to share a passionate kiss, but there's nothing particularly warm about two stars who seem to sexually repel each other.

Even with no discernable chemistry whatsoever, Cruise and Diaz still manage to have fun on their own. Cruise's cocky bravado is enjoyable to watch in the midst of raucous action sequences and Diaz's eventual graduation from squealing victim to confident heroine is encouragingly refreshing. The key here is that they both come to life only when there's a car chase or an explosion or a shootout. This action-oriented awakening is a product of both characters being quite flat and uninteresting.

Cruise's Roy and Diaz's June are both designed as vessels through which the two stars can flash their smiles and work their charms. There's no depth to either character, so they only appear engaging for brief moments when their celebrity charisma takes over. Since that only seems to happen when bullets whiz by their pretty faces, every scene that is wedged between the blockbuster stunts and pyrotechnics is awkwardly forgettable.

Roy is never more than a super-spy spoof, so Cruise is having fun when there's a gun in his hand, but he's otherwise lost and in a struggled search for something silly to do. After a while, it starts feeling like Cruise is simply going through the motions, relying so completely on his recycled checklist of mannerisms (smile lots, talk fast) that Roy ceases to be a human character and rather regresses to the level of a soulless robot.

The issues with character definition and development extend to Mangold's direction, which mirrors the same start-stop mentality the plagues the lead performances. Whenever the narrative launches into another action sequence, Mangold suddenly seems fresh with ideas and imagination. A tracking shot that captures a fistfight in an airplane cabin from outside of the actual airplane, the camera hurriedly peering through the windows, is an especially inventive moment that shows Mangold has something to offer the action genre.

There are several other intriguing sequences that provide decent amounts of popcorn-flavoured entertainment. The majority of the movie is told from the perspective of June, who is essentially an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. As a result of this wide-eyed point of view, the action tends to happen all around us and we keep catching specific glimpses of Roy's acrobatic killing skills. It's a fun and lightly unique approach to action sequence direction and the perspective switch doesn't cancel the joy of watching the flashy stunts.

But that's all Knight and Day has to offer, which isn't nearly enough to prevent the movie from spiraling out of control. Each enjoyable action sequence is glued to a series of scenes that feel utterly fluffy and inconsequential in terms of dramatic purpose. Nothing has any weight to it, which means the story never makes any kind of lasting impression. The movie tries to be many things (romantic comedy, playful parody, high-octane action flick) and it ends up stretching itself so thin that it completely dissolves before our very eyes.

With its poor comic timing, awkward plot threads, and meaningless attitude, Knight and Day is sort of useless and pathetic. It's sort of ambitious, too, which is worthy of an underwhelming pat on the back, but it never knows how to play to its strengths or how to stay on task. It's a choppy, brittle mess that is perhaps best described as the narrative equivalent of video and audio tracks running out of sync. The jokes are there on the screen, but they're not funny. The charming stars are smiling, but it's not convincing. The action is fun, but it's not important. Nothing adds up and no one seems to know what the hell is going on most of the time. The pieces are present, but nothing clicks together to create a cohesive whole. Knight and Day features many shots of attractive celebrities attractively smiling, but looking back over the wreckage that is this movie, I can only offer a frown in return for something so needlessly vacuous.