From a marketing standpoint, Tom Cruise is the biggest selling point of Knight and Day, but in practice, he’s the film’s biggest liability. (Okay, second-biggest, after that moronic title.) Playing a cocky superspy who acquires a beautiful but unwilling civilian sidekick (Cameron Diaz) during a mission to protect a miraculous new battery from falling into the clutches of the enemy, Cruise kills eight people at a time with his bare hands, leaps from motorcycles onto moving cars, pilots helicopters, and strides through hails of machine-gun bullets without the slightest trace of worry creasing his forehead. Cruise’s character is set up as a fantasy male — Diaz goes all gooey-eyed the moment their paths cross, and the film is structured as a parody of a romantic vacation, with Diaz repeatedly getting drugged and waking up in exotic new settings and gun battles with assorted bad guys substituting for intercourse. As retrograde as its sexual politics may be, with Cruise serving as the protector of the helpless, passive Diaz, the film still wants the women in the audience to surrender to the daffy, giddy notion of having that dashing, confident, still boyishly handsome Tom Cruise taking you away from your dull life and whisking you away to adventures and places you could never imagine, watching out for your well-being every step of the way. (Even when he appears to be cruel to you, it turns out that it was all for your own good.)Except Cruise isn’t as appealing as he or the film thinks he is — easily the worst parts of Knight and Day are the sequences where Cruise performs outrageous feats of physical derring-do, and reacting to Diaz’ terror with a series of glib quips and one-liners. It's obnoxious. In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman observed how one of the primary duties of a Hollywood screenwriter is to “protect the star” — in other words, to make sure that the star of the film always looks as smart, handsome, charismatic, funny, and flawless as possible. The screenplay of Knight and Day is credited to Patrick O’Neill, who must have been working overtime on Tom Cruise protection duty; never is there the sense that Cruise is in danger or that any troubling situation or moral quandary will come along to wipe that grin off his face. Or that his character really will turn out to be crazy or untrustworthy or malevolent. The part has obviously been tailored to Cruise, but he seems wrong for the role — wrong in the sense that a more vulnerable actor might have brought to the role. In one scene, Cruise and Diaz have a rare moment of peace and relaxation as they drive along the highway. Diaz tries to find out a little about Cruise’s past, and learns that he was an Eagle scout. “I was a Brownie,” she says softly. “Cool,” Cruise murmurs. With another actor, that line could have been poignant, a suggestion of all the innocent childhood games he put behind him when he joined the CIA; with Cruise saying it, it’s an empty syllable, an affirmation that he’s in a cool movie and he’s being cool in it.
But Tom Cruise isn’t cool anymore, of course, and I think critics’ disappointment at seeing him trying to hang onto his youthful action-movie cred in something like Knight and Day is fueling the mostly negative reviews this movie has gotten. But after those two very long paragraphs I’ve just finished writing, will you still believe me if I say that Cruise aside, I kind of enjoyed Knight and Day on its own terms as a light, breezy popcorn movie?
It was directed by James Mangold, a director who seems to pick each new project on the basis of which one will most confound auteurist critics — his films include the Sundance drama Heavy, the Oscar-bait biopic Walk the Line, the Russell Crowe/Christian Bale western 3:10 to Yuma, the Meg Ryan romcom Kate & Leopold, and the delirious sub-Shyamalan thriller Identity. I get the feeling Mangold had zero interest in the underlying themes of Knight and Day, if indeed there are any, but I think he does a capable job of keeping the tone light and he keeps the action sequences exciting without letting them overwhelm Cruise and Diaz. (Mangold makes a point of putting his stars in the same frame as the action as much as possible — I particularly liked a shot of Diaz’ eyes widening in amazement as she tries to drive a car while a nearby truck flips in the air.) You don’t feel pummeled coming out of Knight and Day the way you did after True Lies or Mr. & Mrs. Smith; sure, it’s a little clueless when it comes to love and romance, but at least it’s not sadistic.
As I write this, it’s looking like Knight and Day is shaping up to be a bit of a box-office disappointment. I hope it pulls out of its tailspin, if only for the sake of Cameron Diaz, who hasn’t had a respectable live-action hit since the second Charlie’s Angels film, back in 2003. (I use the word “respectable” loosely.) Knight and Day was conceived mainly as a popular rehabilitation project for Tom Cruise, but it’s Cameron Diaz, with her goofy, guileless smile and her glamourous good humour, who I found myself liking all over again. Even when Mangold assigns her hopeless bits of business (like being handed a machine gun and then helplessly firing it all over the room because, uh, girls get all panicky around weapons) she doesn’t get dragged down by them. “You’re a natural,” Cruise keeps telling her throughout Knight and Day, and on that account, anyhow, he’s 100 per cent correct.
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