Knight and Day reviewed

It’s actually difficult to review action comedy Knight and Day because the film is such utter nonsense. Or utter rubbish if you’re completely unable to see the humour in this frenetic, ultimately forgettable piece of cinema fluff. This said, Knight and Day is not completely irredeemable if you’re in the market for some escapist, frequently illogical entertainment, and you possess the ability to completely disengage your brain.


Although plot is definitely not the film’s strength, Knight and Day centres on ordinary young woman June Havens (Cameron Diaz), a car restorer who finds herself at the receiving end of attention from Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), an apparently deranged super spy who has gone rogue in order to sell a revolutionary new energy source to European weapons developers. As Roy’s (initially) unwilling sidekick – hauled off to various exotic locations around the world – June is forced to decide whether her new protector is telling the truth, or is utterly crazy. If June decides the latter, she will be siding with the authorities and settling on a safe, predictable existence.

The character of June could easily have been hysterical and irritating but Diaz is surprisingly likeable. Wide eyed June isn’t immune to panic, but she’s free-spirited, feisty and resourceful as the need arises. Cruise meanwhile seems to have maintained the sense of humour he demonstrated in Tropic Thunder. Roy is like Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt, but deliberately infused with the real life insanity Cruise has come to be associated with in recent years. Roy is charming, a deadly combatant and completely unhinged from the perspective of a normal, law-abiding citizen like June.

These days hefty chunks of the media and film industry love to revel in every one of Cruise’s failures, but ignoring Knight and Day’s poor box office performance, the actor definitely deserves some credit this time for consciously and effectively poking fun at his persona, onscreen and off – even if he’s starting to look quite physically worn for a man in his late forties.


Anyway, as mentioned before, Knight and Day is a mix of positives and negatives. In keeping with the James Bond tradition of espionage movies, Knight and Day features some gorgeous location filming in the likes of the Austrian Alps, Salzburg and a private tropical island. There are some other enjoyable touches in the film as well. The hand-to-hand combat is especially well choreographed and one sequence even pits Cruise and Diaz against a character that looks suspiciously like Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne films – which makes for a pleasant little in-joke.

Apart from its weak plot, and the disappointing speed with which Roy’s good-guy-bad-guy status is resolved, Knight and Day falls down most heavily in terms of its CGI-enhanced stunt work. The more realistic action scenes appear, the more immersive and impressive they are. Unfortunately, in Knight and Day the computer effects are of a generally poor quality, and so unsubtle that they detract from audience enjoyment of the ludicrous stunt work. Finally, there are at least two montages in Knight and Day that simulate the effects of being drugged and dragged across the globe. It’s a clever way to capture the disorientation of slipping in and out of consciousness (when you’re at the mercy of a secret agent) but these scenes badly affect the narrative momentum of the movie. They seem more gimmicky than anything that adds real value to the film.

Of course it’s arguable that Knight and Day never intended to be a film of any value or significance at all. Its goal seems to just be light hearted, breezy and action-packed. And in that the film succeeds. It’s a pity though that the whole project couldn’t have placed a bit more emphasis on coherence and credible romantic attraction – because the charisma of the film’s leads just isn’t quite enough to distract from these two major weaknesses of Knight and Day.