Knight and Day: Unjustly maligned upon its release, more for Tom Cruise’s weird slide into mid-life than the quality of the film, much the same way that Mel Gibson movies now carry the same stigma of him being a racist misogynist antisemite, this film is actually a fun little mishmash of action thriller and rom-com that doesn‘t take itself too seriously. On the way back to her sister’s wedding in Boston, June Havens (Cameron Diaz) accidentally runs into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) at the Wichita airport and soon finds herself, through no fault of her own, well over her head in espionage derring-do as Miller drags her along on his mission to save the inventor of a new revolutionary power source from those who would take it, including traitors within his own organization and various and sundry undesirable third parties like arms dealers. We get bullets flying, things blowing up, chop-socky hijinks, and a fight in an airplane cabin that uses seems to use every part of the cabin as a weapon. And in between there is enough glib dialogue to carry it along, not that there is much downtime between action set pieces. Paul Dano and Peter Sarsgaard are here in support. Cruise and Diaz are good together, though their romantic relationship doesn’t ring true, but really how can it when the films requires a huge suspension of disbelief just to keep the plot rolling along. It feels like watching a spy-themed comic book of the more ridiculous variety, with every salient plot point telegraphed from way, way out. Great filmmaking this is not (an over-reliance on various characters getting “drugged” to help speed along the plot by showing you just snippets of what is happening gets old when it’s used over and over again), but it’s certainly slick as all get out and a fairly pleasant time-waster. Woodchuck sez, “Worth a look“.
No comments:
Post a Comment