The star power of Cruise and Diaz can’t save this action flop
Film review
Knight and Day
Cert: 12A
Rhys Griffiths
THIS action-comedy proves that no amount of star power can make up for a lazy script, lazier direction, a total lack of depth and a seriously bad pun of a title.
Centered around the whereabouts of the enigmatic “Zephyr”, a top-secret battery gizmo with perpetual power, Knight and Day sees Tom Cruise’s rogue FBI agent Roy Miller on the run from his former colleagues with Diaz’s ditzy everygirl in tow. He’s got the Zephyr, you see, and carries it around in a toy knight – hence, in a seriously laboured way, that awful title. Oh and Knight might be Miller’s real name. Whatever. Knight and Day makes no sense as a title and less as a film.
Diaz plays June Havens, an average nobody – to the extent that Cameron Diaz can be an average nobody, which is no extent at all – who gets tangled up with Miller after he wipes out everyone on the plane in which they’re both traveling, crash landing it in a field. Initially an unwilling sidekick, June soon learns the ropes, and the pair globe-trot from one CGI-powered fight to another. But is Miller the good guy he claims or the mentally unstable renegade the FBI have labeled him? Given Cruise’s all-round good guy credentials, one might be prepared to hazard a preliminary guess.
Knight and Day falls short of producing anything like the excitement or laughs it aims for. Instead it’s reduced to a series of stagnant set pieces in exotic locations – and we’ve seen all that before. While Cruise is comfortable as the cocksure Miller, he’s certainly had better co-stars than Diaz, whose character has an annoying habit of explaining in step-by-step terms what she’s thinking – as tired and contrived an exposition device as any you’ll find. With minimal laughs and a massive underestimation of its audience’s intelligence, this simply isn’t good enough.