I will say this about Knight and Day: it is 100% as advertised. After first seeing the trailer for this film, I remember saying something to the effect of "What just happened?" And yet I found myself looking forward to it. It's a rare thing that a film actually delivers what the trailer promises, and here via the trailer we are promised ridiculous, over-the-top action sequences combined with a throwaway plot and cheesy dialog...and that's exactly what we get.
I'm a complete action movie junkie, so it's no surprise that the ridiculous-looking action sequences were the main draw of the film for me. My only complaint is that there weren't more of them and that they weren't longer. The action is so unapologetically ridiculous that they just add to the comedy of the whole situation, and you're too busy laughing and enjoying the ride that you don't notice that the special effects are horrendous. I mean seriously, how can you find time to complain about bad compositing when there's a man in front of you who just pulled a knife out of his heart to continue on with his business of kicking ass, only to get thrown through the window of a moving train and, while holding on only by a chain of sausage, gets obliterated by another passing train? The plot is serviceable enough to hold this string of sequences together, but pretty basic. Cameron Diaz is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets mixed up in the affairs of Tom Cruise, who is a special agent gone rogue. He will stop at nothing to prevent a top secret government project from falling into the wrong hands of another, evil government agent...or will he? You get the idea. Pretty standard stuff.
The weakness of the movie, as if it wasn't obvious, is the part of movie where guys aren't pulling knifes out of their hearts and getting thrown out train windows. The slow parts are just hilarious, in a that-really-shouldn't-be-funny kind of way. This is mainly because there is absolutely zero chemistry between Cruise and Diaz, which could possibly stem from the fact that she's about 4 feet taller than he is. It's interesting, in the slow parts of the movie where I had some time to think, I found myself thinking that if this was a weekly action/comedy TV show I would absolutely watch it. I would completely be on board watching the antics of the crazy ex-government agent every Tuesday at 8 on Fox. This way they would be able to disperse the slow parts of the story over a few weeks rather than getting the equivalent of an entire episodes-worth of boring dialog all at once. I'm just saying...24's off the air now, and Human Target didn't actually wow anybody...so there's room.
If nothing else, this was a way for two people (Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz) to try to prove that they are still relevant. One of them succeeded. I haven't liked Tom Cruise for quite some time, mainly because I found it difficult to dissociate his ridiculous off-the-screen personality from whatever ridiculous on-the-screen personality he was protraying. Nonetheless I found myself very surprised just how much I enjoyed Cruise's performance. He was his old charismatic 80's/early 90's self again (complete with plenty of aviator sunglasses). And given that (arguably) the last big success he's had was the first Mission: Impossible movie, he needed something to breathe some life into whatever career he may still have. He didn't need to do some serious period-piece, or another Jerry McGuire. He just needed to go back to what got him started in the first place, and I think he succeeded in that. Unfortunately the same can't be said for Cameron Diaz. She really needs some project to show why she should still matter, and if there is one, it's not this one. She just came off as very flat to me, and personally I have zero attraction to her whatsoever as she's really starting to show her age. Again, that's just me.
In the end, I think the endless amount of re-writes and re-shoots ended up absolutely derailing the last third of the movie (they were re-shooting up until mid-May for a film that released in June). When you have a film that's so flimsy to begin with, any bit of doubt just comes through that much more and just destroys the whole thing. That's not to say that I didn't have an absolute blast, but that's just because I was with great company and because I went into it expecting nothing more than the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. It's definitely no A-Team, but if you go in expecting to just completely turn your brain off and watch Tom Cruise run around like a crazy person, you will have as good a time as I did. Drugs help too.
