'Knight and Day' delivers lots of speed, little substance

Posted June 22, 2010 11:00 pm

Dann Gire

If you took all the breathtaking stunts and wild chase sequences in "Knight and Day" and pressed them together so tight that they squeezed everything else out, you'd still have a bloated, cliche-riddled Hollywood action movie.

Only shorter.

A thin line separates a tongue-in-cheek spy adventure (any 007 film starring Roger Moore) from an overt spy movie parody (any "Austin Powers" comedy).

"Knight and Day" has no idea where that line went.

So, some of Tom Cruise's impressive displays of athletic acumen approach the level of a fun and clever Jackie Chan fight sequence.

Others, such as a scene where Cruise steps into machine gunfire to prove his love (and the bullets magically miss him!) hearkens back to the silliness of Leslie Nielsen's "Naked Gun" comedies.

"Knight and Day" opens with Cruise flashing some free advertising for a cool set of shades (he did wonders for Ray-Ban Wayfarers in "Risky Business") while hanging around an airport.

He checks out women, but not for the regular reasons. When he finally spots June Havens (Cameron Diaz), he makes his move by pretending to bump into her and transferring unknown contraband into her purse.

We find out his name is Roy Miller and he's a rogue CIA agent who's been accused of kidnapping a dweeby genius named Simon Feck (Paul Dano) with his tiny invention: a battery with perpetual, renewable energy.

"Knight and Day" apparently wants to be a source of perpetual energy as well. Director James Mangold throws the narrative thrusters into overdrive, pushing Roy and his unwitting partner June from one hyperbolic survival sequence to the next.

The first one - where Roy takes out an entire jetliner full of agents in flight while the blissfully ignorant June visits the restroom - is Cruise's Ethan Hunt from "Mission Impossible" on nitrous oxide.

Equally impressive are two later sequences involving speeding cars and a motorcycle trying to outrun stampeding bulls.

But eventually, the disorienting velocity of "Knight and Day" borders on the wearisome, and there's not exactly an abundance of emotional connectivity going on to give us much reason to invest in the two leading characters.

Cruise emanates an attractive aura of cool confidence as Roy, who dominates most of the movie while Diaz's heroine spends most of her time freaking out in response to each new threat to her life.

Diaz and Cruise (who last worked together in the mind-gouging "Vanilla Sky") create enough chemistry to make their characters appealing, but Patrick O'Neill's script is a wit-challenged combination of "North by Northwest" and "The A-Team" - with a strong, gun-toting woman at the front instead of in the supporting cast.

Speaking of supporting cast members, the intense Viola Davis and oily Peter Sarsgaard play agents: one honest and the other not.

The fact that you can tell which one is which within 15 minutes is telling of the movie's slavish devotion to conventional expectations.

"Knight and Day"

★★½

Starring: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Jordi Molla

Directed by: James Mangold

Other: A 20th Century Fox release. Rated PG-13 for language, violence. 110 minutes

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